


The Guarded Crown

by isabel_archer



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-11 13:22:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 26,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3328184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isabel_archer/pseuds/isabel_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Historical Fantasy AU involving war, political intrigue, swordfights, dark magic, pirates, and possibly a formal ball (or two).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Man in Black

In dreams all sins are easy, but by day

It is defeat gives proof we are alive;

The sword we suffer is the guarded crown.

-W. H. Auden-

 

The cell was damp and low-ceilinged, with mouldering stone walls and a tiny barred window. But Sansa had been shut in a ship’s hold for the past fortnight, listening to the sobs of her fellow passengers, breathing in a humid fug of vomit and urine, and to her the dungeon was a palace.

 

They put another girl in the cell with her, a merchant’s daughter named Elyn Lanwood. Elyn had pretty blonde curls and a mouthful of broken teeth.

 

Elyn said that one of the guards had hit her—and that when she had cried, he had hit her again, harder.

 

Sansa did not have to ask which of the guards had done it. She knew the one: tall and hard-looking, with a ship’s wheel tattooed beneath his right ear. When the tattooed guard brought their evening meal, he took the opportunity to inspect them—for contraband, he said—letting his fingers linger on their breasts and on the insides of their thighs.

 

Sansa’s indifference to this treatment seemed to enrage him. He shook her, spat at her, pinched her.

           

He liked Elyn better. She cried, and cried, and cried. Long after he left, she was still crying.

 

Sansa lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to the other girl blubber, lispingly, about her mother (dead); her sisters (dead); her kitten (dead); her father’s ships (burned in their anchorage); her family’s house in the capital (now, presumably, a pile of smoking bricks).

 

Elyn worried about her broken teeth. Now that she wasn’t as pretty, she thought that they might give her to the soldiers. The girls they gave to the soldiers didn’t last long, she said.

 

She told Sansa that they had set aside the highborn girls as gifts for the lords, to reward them for their bravery during the war.

 

“If that happens, it won’t be so bad. We’ll have rooms of our own, and maybe a maid, and pretty dresses. But now, with my teeth”—it came out _teef_ , Sansa noted with dispassion—“with my teeth . . .” The girl’s voice broke.

 

Sansa said nothing. She was thinking about the wicked-looking knife that the tattooed guard kept sheathed at his waist. She imagined wrapping her fingers around the leather hilt. First she would use it on the guard. Then on Elyn. Then she would use it on herself.

 

*

 

Early the next morning, the tattooed guard appeared in the doorway, holding a set of restraints. There was another man with him, a handsome young officer with a silver medal pinned to his uniform.

 

A war hero, Sansa thought, with bleak amusement.

 

The officer pointed at Elyn. “That one,” he said.

 

Elyn screamed when the guard took hold of her, and he shook her, so hard that her teeth would have clattered together if more of them had been intact.

 

“Shut up, you stupid little bitch,” he hissed. “Shut your mouth!”

 

Sansa waited. The officer was looking at her, now, with a malevolence that made her stomach clench.

 

But he made no movement towards her. Instead he bent to whisper in Elyn’s ear. The girl quieted at once, and allowed her hands to be bound.

 

“Take her downstairs,” he told the guard.

 

When they had gone, the officer turned back to Sansa. “I know you,” he said, with languorous confidence. “You’re Sansa Stark. I saw you at a ball in the capital--oh, it must be three years ago, now. You _have_ grown.”

 

Sansa bared her teeth.

 

He smiled, as if her anger amused him, and uttered a string of strange words. To anyone listening they would have sounded like nonsense. To Sansa they sounded like bait.

 

She met his eyes. They were a strange, silvery color, like mirrors. His smile deepened: he had put her in an impossible position, and he knew it. Any answer she gave would reveal more than she wanted him to know. And if she chose not to answer--well, that would reveal something, too. 

 

They stood staring at one another for several heart-beats. Then he shrugged, sketched a mocking bow, and took his leave.

 

As the cell door clanged shut, Sansa wanted to shout after him: What about me? What are you going to do with me?

 

Then she remembered: she didn’t care. Not about what happened to her. Not about anything. What a tremendous relief that was.

 

She lay back down on her cot and closed her eyes.

 

*

 

Late that night she was awakened by a commotion in the hall. She crept to the door. The noise—a loud conversation—was coming from the outer vestibule, and she couldn’t make out distinct words, only an angry, snapping rush of speech, followed by stuttering placations.

 

The vestibule door opened with a screech of metal on metal. She heard footsteps, and two male voices, speaking over one another:

 

“My lord—if you could just—after midnight—”

 

“Rode from—do you have any idea, _any_ —”

 

Then, suddenly, the scrape of a key in the cell door.

 

Sansa stumbled back. When the door opened she was lying on her cot, the blanket pulled up over her shoulders. 

 

A voice, low and slightly burred, said, “Get her up.”

 

Someone gave her shoulders a rough shake.

 

Sansa rolled over, blinking. “What is it?” she murmured. “What’s wrong?”

 

“Get up.”

 

She recognized the man looming over her: a Sir Gerold—or was it Sir Gerritt? He had supervised the loading of the ship that had taken her and the other girls from the capital.

 

There was another man standing in the doorway. He was dressed simply, in a black cloak and boots. He looked as though he had just arrived from somewhere else: boots muddy, gloves in hand. His sharp face was pale, and there was a smudge of dirt across one cheekbone. A body servant stood behind him, holding a torch.

 

“You heard Sir Gerrin,” he said. “Get up.”

 

Very slowly, Sansa stood, shaking out the stained and tattered remains of her dress. At its best it had been a simple cotton house-dress, and now, covered with blood and sick—some her own, some not—it was wretched.

 

The man seized the torch from his servant, then took hold of her chin. He turned her head this way and that, inspecting her as if she were a horse that he was considering buying.

 

“This is her, Lord Baelish,” said Sir Gerrin, with exaggerated courtesy. “I told you I had taken care of it, and haven’t I?”

           

“ _She_ ,” snapped Lord Baelish. He picked up a matted snarl of her hair, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

           

“Pardon, my lord?” Sir Gerrin said, sounding extremely put-upon.

 

“‘This is she,’ not ‘this is her.’”

 

“Just as you say, my lord.”

 

Lord Baelish turned. “Sir Gerrin,” he said, “How do I know that, in my absence, you haven’t given first rights to someone else? Perhaps at this very moment someone—Lord Dunsany, say—is enjoying my prize, while I’m left with . . . this.” His voice was all haughty peevishness, but Sansa caught an undercurrent of something else. Fear? Why would a great lord have anything to fear from a lug like Sir Gerrin?

 

“Now, Lord Baelish, begging your pardon, my lord, but I don’t like—I resent the—” Sir Gerrin searched for the word, grasped, and missed. “I resent the _impilation_.” He coughed. “You gave orders; we followed them. This is the only red-haired girl we found. There are others, if you want more of a selection. Plenty of gently-born blondes and brunettes, curly hair, straight hair, whatever you like. But this is the only red-haired girl.”

 

Lord Baelish’s silence seemed to make him nervous. He added, hastily, “General Yin’s son asked for her, my lord, but the Queen said that because of your service in the war you must have your just reward. We have followed orders. Everything’s been done just as you said. Exactly as you said. Sir. My lord.”

 

Torch in hand, Lord Baelish crossed the cell in two strides. Sir Gerrin was the taller of the two—by an inch at least—but he cowered, taking one step back, and then another.

 

“If she is truly the only red-haired maid that you found,” Lord Baelish said evenly, “then you knew that she was mine.”

 

Sir Gerrin went pale beneath his ale-ruddied cheeks. He was thick, but not too thick to realize that he’d been caught in a trap of some kind. His eyes flicked to Sansa, nervously.

 

“She’s half-starved,” Lord Baelish continued. “There is a cut across her brow and a bad bruise on her right wrist. She is ill as well. She has a fever; do you see how glassy her eyes are?”

 

“M-my lord,” stuttered the captain. “I—”

 

“Let me advise you, Sir Gerrin, to stop there.” He spoke calmly, softly, and with such cold menace that Sansa almost felt sorry for the other man. “But I will say this: I do not look kindly upon those who would mistreat my property. Do you understand me? If you do, say, ‘yes, my lord.’”

 

Sir Gerrin nodded, licking his lips. “Yes, my lord.”

 

“Good, good,” Lord Baelish said, suddenly all friendliness. “Good man.” He clapped Sir Gerrin on the back. Then, without even a glance at Sansa, he stepped through the open doorway, saying, “Send her to me in the morning. But for the sake of all heavens and hells, make sure she gets a bath first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess I'm jumping into the deep end (eek!), but I'm going to give writing a multi-chapter fic a try! I'm really busy with school right now, but if people seem to be enjoying the story I'll do my best to keep it regularly updated.
> 
> Warning: this is a pretty loose interpretations of these two characters, and their behavior may end up surprising you. (In a good way. I mean, that's the hope. :) )


	2. The Broken Mirror

When Sir Gerrin returned just before dawn Sansa was already awake. Silently he handed her a slice of thinly buttered bread and a woolen cloak, motioning for her to pull the hood over her hair. The cloak smelled strongly of sheep and the sweat of the soldier who’d worn it last, but it was the warmest thing that she had worn in a long time.

 

At first they seemed to be going deeper into the keep; the stone paving slanting downward into narrow dirt passageways marked with puddles of foul-smelling bilge. Sir Gerrin moved with surprising speed. Sansa had to trot to keep up with him. Twice she stumbled over her skirts, and twice Sir Gerrin caught her elbow, righted her, and pulled her along.

 

“Quickly, now,” he whispered, after the second time. “There’s not much time.” His voice was rough with lack of sleep and his breath reeked of something stronger than ale.

 

He’s afraid, Sansa realized. And not only of Lord Baelish. Someone will not be happy about my leaving this place.

 

Finally they began to climb upward again, ascending a twisting staircase that ended at a small round door. With shaking hands Sir Gerrin fitted a key into the lock, and a moment later they emerged into a cold grey morning.

 

There were four men waiting for them alongside an unmarked black carriage. The men held themselves like soldiers, but they were wearing uniforms of plain grey. Not the Queen’s men, then, but members of Lord Baelish’s private guard.

           

One of the guards helped Sansa into the carriage. “Stay here,” he said.

 

Sansa bit back a retort: where exactly did he imagine that she would go, alone in a strange city, friendless and penniless? There was only one place she could think of—and Sansa would prefer to take her chances with Lord Baelish, first.

 

The carriage interior was surprisingly luxurious: two benches of padded green velvet, the ceiling and walls lined with black silk printed in a pattern of mockingbirds.

 

He likes beautiful things, Sansa thought. Beautiful, expensive things. She would remember that. 

 

She watched Lord Baelish’s guards through the curtain. Three of them went around to the front of the carriage; the springs shifting and settling under their weight. The fourth went to speak with Sir Gerrin, a leather bag in hand. From the size and shape of the bag, Sansa guessed that it contained eighty gold pieces: she was worth about as much as a well-bred broodmare, then. How strange it was to have one’s value laid out in such bald terms.

 

Sansa saw the knife flash a heart-beat before Sir Gerrin; the man feinted, but too late. The blade slid into the side of his neck, and by the time it came out, bringing a good deal of blood with it, the old drunk was already dead.

 

Very gently, the guard lowered Sir Gerrin’s body to the ground. Then he wiped his blade on the dead man’s tunic and picked up the bag of silver.

           

A moment later they were off.

 

*

 

Sansa did not know Venosa well enough to guess where they were going. She had been to the city before, but only once, when she was very young. The things she remembered were not especially useful: sunlight glinting on the city’s white walls; the steep pitch of the streets as they climbed, switchback, from the harbor to the keep.

 

Every bump and jolt of the carriage brought Sir Gerrin’s face flashing into her mind.

 

He was no friend of yours, she told herself. He was a disgusting old drunk; and a traitor, too. He helped to burn your city, to murder your people.

 

By the time they arrived at their destination, the sun had burned off most of the mist and Sansa was sweating inside her heavy cloak. But the sight of Lord Baelish's house momentarily distracted her from her discomfort.

 

Before her rose a four-story townhouse of grey brick, surrounded by a paved yard and a small stable block. The estate was far more modest than she had expected. It was also situated surprisingly close to the harbor: above the steeply pitched roof gulls wheeled, crying forlornly, and everything smelled of salt and sulfur.

  

The location was certainly unfashionable, Sansa mused, but it was also, perhaps, strategic: from here one could leave the city quickly, and without attracting much notice.

           

One of the guards escorted her through the front door—the knocker, she noticed with some amusement, was wrought in the shape of a mockingbird—and then vanished, leaving her to consider her surroundings.

 

The hall was airy, the furnishings fine but old-fashioned. A tall, auburn-haired woman bustled in, beaming at Sansa as if she were an honored guest rather than a prisoner. “You must be Alayne,” she said, in the broad-voweled accent of a native Venosian. “Welcome to Mockingbird House. I’m Ros, Lord Baelish’s housekeeper.”

 

Ros was clear-skinned, pink-cheeked, shiny-haired. Beside her Sansa felt like a corpse. She probably smelled like one, too.

 

Ros’s delicate nose wrinkled ever so slightly. “You’ll be wanting a bath, love,” she said, “It's already drawn; and I have some bread and honey and some nice soft cheese for you, too. We’re very pleased that you’re here. Travel can be so hard on a lady, I know.”

 

Ros led her to a tiled chamber on the second floor of the house. Sansa took in the steaming porcelain tub, the stack of white towels, the basket piled with pink rounds of soap. To her horror, she found herself blinking back tears.

 

“You just get out of those clothes,” said Ros. “I’ll be right back.”

 

When the housekeeper returned she was wearing an apron over her pretty dress; without a word she set to work scrubbing Sansa with a cotton cloth, tutting over each bruise and cut.

 

She spent the better part of an hour trying to comb Sansa's hopelessly tangled hair. “Just cut it,” Sansa said, after the first ten minutes. “I don’t care.” Her voice sounded coarse and strange to her ears.

 

Ros seemed horrified. “Oh, no. He would—” She checked. “We can’t do that.”

 

They went through three tubs of hot water—all of it ferried in, bucket by bucket, by a trio of sullen maids.

 

“They’re horrid lazy,” Ros told her, confidingly. “Lord Baelish had a hot water tap put in up here; they’re only carrying it from down the hall.”

 

When at last Sansa was clean and dry, Ros helped her into a white cotton dress.

 

“Come here,” she said, drawing her into a little alcove just off the washroom.

 

It was a pretty room, clearly meant for a lady, with pale pink walls, a vanity table covered with little crystal pots, a velvet stool. And—luxury of luxuries—a large oval mirror.

 

It was to the mirror Ros steered her. “Look,” she said.

 

Sansa looked. And as she looked, everything else—Ros, the pretty room—seemed to recede, until all she could see was the face in the mirror. It was a stranger's face; the face of someone who danced at balls and laughed with friends and painted watercolors of flowers and puppies. It was the face of a dead girl.

 

Distantly, she heard a loud noise—even more distantly, she realized that the noise was coming from her own mouth.

 

A little silver box of scented talc went flying, exploding in a puffy cloud; a crystal jar of lavender oil dripped down the wall.

 

When the velvet stool hit the mirror, the glass shattered, very satisfyingly, into a hundred pieces.

 

There were voices, and hands, too, but Sansa couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t stop. Her throat burning, she grasped a mirror-shard the size of a dagger. She squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed, feeling warmth spread over her hands, down her wrists. She sighed. The pain was so sweet. Already the dead girl’s face was fading into the darkness, vanishing like a stone in deep water.

 

She felt a pair of arms wrap around her, strong fingers prying her own from the mirror-shard.

 

Then a handkerchief pressed to her face, the silk smelling of fresh mint and something else, something sickly sweet. After that, there was nothing.

 

*

 

When Sansa woke, she was lying on a bed in a candlelit room. Her right hand was bandaged. Her head felt dry and fuzzy, as though she'd drunk too much wine.

 

As her vision cleared, she saw that Ros was sitting next to the bed, reading a little blue book. The title swam into view: _Lady Belsaira’s Secret_. One of the tawdry popular romances that Sansa's mother had forbidden her from reading.

 

Ros set aside her book and placed a cool, soft hand on Sansa's forehead. “Would you like something to drink? Something to eat?”

 

At Sansa's silence, Ros sighed. “Lord Baelish has asked you to join him for dinner. You’ll feel better by then; it’s the ether that’s making your head feel so strange.” She hesitated. “He's the one who stopped you, you know."

 

“No,” Sansa said.

           

“No?” Ros said, pausing in pouring her a cup of water—the cup was silver, not glass, Sansa noted—from a pitcher on the bedside table.

 

“No. I won’t have dinner with him.”

 

Ros set down the cup and pitcher and came to sit on the edge of the bed. She looked at Sansa, very seriously, and Sansa saw that she was, perhaps, not very much older than herself. There were lines surrounding her eyes and mouth, but they were lines of care, not years. Whoever this woman was, she had not had an easy life.

 

Ros tried to take her uninjured left hand; when Sansa pulled away, her plump white fingers began to trace one of the birds embroidered on the coverlet. “You know,” she said, carefully, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

 

Sansa stared.

 

“I mean that it doesn’t have to be hot baths and new dresses and nice dinners with the lord. Do you understand me?”

 

She spoke kindly, not threateningly, but her words still reminded Sansa of _him_ , last night, in her cell: of the coldness in his face and voice. _I do not look kindly upon those who would mistreat my property. Do you understand me?_

 

Sansa closed her eyes again, but Ros kept speaking. “I know you think that it can’t get any worse. But it can. It can. In this world, for a woman, it can _always_ get worse.”

 

The housekeeper stood. “You’ll find that the wardrobe has everything you might need—dresses, stockings, shoes. I’ll return for you in an hour.”

 

When Ros left, she locked the door behind her. Sansa couldn’t help but feel that she had exchanged one kind of cell for another.


	3. The Door in the Dark

Sansa—reasonably, she thought—had expected that dinner would be served in one of the house’s dining rooms.

 

“No,” Ros said. “When Lord Baelish isn’t entertaining, he dines in his study, up on the fourth floor. Hand me that ribbon, will you?”

 

“His study is in the attic?” Sansa said. “That’s . . . unusual.” Attics were for servant’s quarters, nurseries, storage—in other words, for things that aristocrats liked to keep out of sight, like children and ugly furniture.

 

“Yes, well,” Ros murmured, “He’s an unusual man. There—very pretty—I knew the blue would look well with your hair. Come now, we don’t want to keep him waiting.”

 

Their way led up a windowless staircase at the back of the house. As Sansa moved through that narrow, twisting space, illuminated only by flickering candlelight, Mockingbird House suddenly seemed to her an enchanted castle, a sorcerer’s lair, shadow-filled and perilous.

 

She was a princess in a tower, she thought; and Lord Baelish, the dragon. But no prince on a white steed would be coming to her rescue. Of that Sansa was certain.

 

She thought: I am a prisoner in a strange land, far from everyone and everything that I have ever known. The feeling of loneliness was so sharp, so sudden and piercing, that she almost gasped.

 

They came at last to a large oak door, carved all over in a pattern of roses. Sansa suspected that if she looked closely she would find a mockingbird or two hiding amongst the thorns.

 

“In there,” Ros said, panting a little from the climb.

 

“You’re not joining us?” Sansa asked. “I thought . . .”

 

Ros shook her head. “I’m not allowed in there. No one is.”

 

Sansa’s stomach gave an unpleasant lurch. “How do his meals get sent up, then?” she snapped. “You said he eats up here.”

 

Ros’s eyes dropped to the floor. “There’s a dumbwaiter.”

 

Sansa watched the candle-flame vanish and thought, she’s leaving me to the dragon, just like the villagers in those old stories.

 

And then she was alone in the dark, facing the door to the dragon’s den.

 

*

 

Cautiously Sansa knocked, once—twice—three times, and after the last, a low voice said, “Come in.”

 

She pushed open the heavy door. For a moment she stood there in a rectangle of dusky light.

 

The room was astonishing. High above her head the roof vaulted, the beams disappearing into darkness. It was like behind inside a cathedral, or the overturned hull of a ship. And there were things, beautiful, expensive things: books and scrolls, tapestries and paintings, alchemical instruments of gold and glass.

 

Everywhere she looked, candles burned, filling the air with a warm, heady perfume of honey and tallow.

 

And in the center of it all, slouched in a leather armchair like a brooding fairy king, sat Lord Baelish. On the table before him was laid out the finest meal that Sansa had ever seen: roasted chicken, whole steamed fish, pink slices of rinded ham, delicately blanched greens, tiny boiled partridge eggs, golden hothouse apples, a silver bowl filled with cherries in syrup and another heaped with sugared pomegranate seeds. There were crystal decanters of wine, too, their contents glowing like liquid jewels.

 

Her captor stood. “Good evening.”

 

Sansa, wandering the room, gave no answer. The whole western wall was taken up with a row of enormous single-paned windows, and the view was magnificent, looking down over the tops of fir trees, pale cliffs, and, below that, the sea. The lanterns of anchored ships glowed in the darkling harbor like stars. It was vast and wild and magical, and Sansa, her breath making cloudy puffs on the glass, felt something deep in her rise up as if in answer to it.

 

“Beautiful, don’t you think?”

 

She startled, feeling as though he had crept up behind her to whisper in her ear. But when she turned he was still slouched in the leather armchair.

 

She considered his question, thinking of the modesty of his house’s exterior, of the conservative, old-fashioned comfort of its public rooms. This place—and that view, with its promise of escape—was his secret.

 

She said, “I think you like beautiful things, Lord Baelish.” Another man might have taken this for coquetry, but Sansa knew that he would take her meaning. She wanted him to know that she had seen and understood something important about him. She wanted that knowledge to make him uneasy.

 

But he only smiled at her over the rim of his wine glass, not distressed in the least. “Call me Petyr,” he said.

 

He seemed different than he had the previous night. His hair was combed and his face freshly shaven. His dusty traveling clothes had been exchanged for a soft-looking wool tunic and breeches. Even his voice was different, the rough burr of the northern colonies exchanged for a bland aristocratic drawl that might have belonged to any capital-bred nobleman.

 

But the difference was more than his grooming, his clothes, his speech. She felt that last night she had caught him with his mask half-off, glimpsed something savage that had now been contained beneath a carefully controlled exterior.

 

“Please,” he said, “Sit.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were shadowed.

 

He rose to help her into her seat, then began to arrange a plate for her. A few tender morsels of meat, a partridge egg, a spoonful of pomegranate seeds, a tiny apple. He poured her a glass of red wine, and the clean mint smell of him mingling with the sweetness of the fruit and the sharpness of the wine made her dizzy.

 

“Tell me, Sansa,” he said, when he had returned to his own seat. “How do you like your room? If there is anything that you require for your comfort, you need only ask.”

 

She bit into the apple. Perhaps some food would clear her head. She felt utterly outmatched by him, as if they were playing a game whose rules she had forgotten or never known at all.

 

And she hated the sound of her name on his lips, lilting and sibilant. It reminded her of couples spinning across marble ballrooms in the capital. It reminded her of other things, too: things that she would rather forget.

 

She swallowed and set down the apple. “Your housekeeper called me Alayne.”

 

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. It is best that we keep your true identity a secret for the time being, even from my household. In public, your name is Alayne Stone. But in private . . . ” The word _private_ hung in the air like candle-smoke.

 

Sansa frowned. “At least one person knows who I am.”

 

Lord Baelish did not seem surprised. “A young officer with pretty grey eyes and a great big dinner plate pinned to his uniform?”

 

She nodded.

 

He leaned forward. “Alec Yin. For the moment, we don’t need to worry about him. But tell me what he said to you.”

 

Sansa looked down at her plate. It was easier to think that way. “He said that he had seen me at a ball in the capital.”

 

“And?” he prodded.

 

She hesitated. “He said something to me—I didn’t understand it, but I had heard it once before.” She repeated the string of strange words, then added, “My mother made me memorize those words. It was very important to her. She said knowing them might get me out of a lot of trouble, one day.”

 

For several heart-beats Lord Baelish was silent.

 

Then he said, very abruptly, “Well—I believe that it has. Tell me, what do you know of Venosa?”

 

“Not very much,” she said. “My mother didn’t like to speak of her childhood. She didn’t like to speak of her life before she married my father, really. But my nurse—”

 

“Told you that we were sorcerers and witches, cavorting with demons and committing all manner of unspeakable acts,” he finished, a vulpine smile on his face.

 

“Yes, something like that,” said Sansa. In this room, with this man, it seemed less unlikely than it once had. “But she also told me that if I slept with coins under my pillow on Midsummer Eve, I would dream of my future husband.”

 

He laughed, briefly. “What would you say if I told you that those strange words were meant to bring you under Alec’s power?”

 

“Under his power?” Sansa repeated.

 

“To make you susceptible to his will.”

 

She thought about the hungry malevolence in the young officer’s gaze. “I’d say that I believe you.”

 

“Good," he said. "Now--what would you say if I told you that I could teach you words that would bring people under _your_ power?”

 

Sansa’s heart was beating very fast. He had risen to approach her chair, sinking to one knee so that their faces were at a level. His eyes were unsettling, deep green running to grey around the edges, and shifting in the candlelight.

 

“May I?” he asked, glancing at her bandaged hand.

 

She nodded.

 

Very gently, he picked up her hand, his eyes still locked with hers. “Look,” he said.

 

Sansa looked. Her hand was perfect, without bandage or wound.

 

She took a breath. “Is it—”

 

“No.” He returned to his own side of the table, where he poured himself another glass of wine. “An illusion, only. But illusions can be very powerful.”

 

She drained her own glass, then said, “Tell me why.”

 

Lord Baelish shifted in his seat. “What do you mean?”

 

“Tell me why would you teach me something like that. Something that could give me power over people.” Power over you, she added silently.

 

“In six weeks’ time the Queen is giving a ball to celebrate the end of the war.”

 

“The end of the rebellion, you mean,” said Sansa.

 

He rubbed his chin. “Venosa is two thousand years older than the upstart fiefdom that you call an empire.” He let out a sharp laugh. “Well—that you _called_ an empire. With the capital in ruins I can’t imagine that many of the colonies will be quick to pay homage. Or taxes, for that matter.”

 

“Lord Baelish—”

 

He held up a hand. “Now, now,” he said. “Let’s not quarrel over politics. I am no patriot. Ask anyone: they will tell you that I have little love for anyone or anything but myself.”

 

I believe you, she thought.

 

He went on, smoothly. “In a month you will have recovered from your fever—”

 

“I have no fever,” she protested. But she remembered him in her cell, his face like thunder: _She has a fever; do you see how glassy her eyes are?_

 

“No. But Alayne does.” He pointed at her bandaged hand, now resting on the table. “That was a nice touch, by the way. There’s a fashion just now for fevers and extreme behavior. Why, just last month Lord Jeera’s youngest daughter tried to jump off her balcony because of a fever.” He smiled, unpleasantly. “When her father finds out the real reason, he’ll likely toss her off the balcony himself.”

 

Sansa poured herself another glass of wine.

 

He leaned back, steepling his fingers. “Ordinarily, of course, as my . . . companion, you would accompany me to social engagements. Luncheons, private dinners, theatrical performances.” He paused. “People expect . . .”

 

Bringing her wine glass to her lips, Sansa found that she had exhausted it once more; as she reached for the decanter, he stood.

 

“Allow me,” he said, not bothering to keep the amusement from his voice. “The Queen’s ball,” he said, “will be your grand debut. Everyone will be so very eager to see you—their appetites whetted, you see, by the long anticipation.”

 

He handed her the glass, his fingers warm against her own.

 

Sansa swallowed. Her head was spinning: too much ether and wine, too little food and sleep. “I still don’t understand,” she whispered, “What happens at the ball? What will you get out of . . . teaching me?”

 

“Oh, Sansa,” he said, very gently. “It’s not what I will get out of it. It’s what _we_ will get out of it: the one thing that we both want most in all the world.”

 

The edges of her vision were hazy, now, his face veiled by a flickering pattern of light and shadow. “And what is that?” she asked, weakly.

 

He grinned. “Revenge.”


	4. The Visitor

She did not see her captor the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.

 

The mornings were long, the afternoons empty and tense as violin strings. Sansa felt that she’d she been granted a reprieve—but from what, or how long it would last, she did not know.

 

She passed most of the daylight hours sitting at the window-seat in her bedchamber. Occasionally she picked up one of Ros’s romances—she had asked to borrow a few—but found that she had little patience for them.

 

Part of it, she supposed, was jealousy—at the triviality of the heroines’ problems (scheming rivals; ruined gowns; mislaid letters) and at the way that things seemed guaranteed to come out right in the end for them.

 

But the larger part of her distaste for the stories was hard to articulate, even to herself. It was as if she were reading with double vision, anticipating but not feeling the excitement with which her former self would have responded to each twist and turn, each romantic speech, each happy ending. It was a painful reminder of how much she had changed, and how little she understood this new Sansa.

 

When she tired of reading, she looked out the window. Her room faced west, just like his study. She half-wondered if this had been intentional. The view was not identical—she couldn’t see the harbor, only the house’s small garden, with its rosebushes, its ivy-covered walls, its border of ancient fir trees. But it was enough to make her think of him.

           

Her bedchamber was small but comfortable, connected to the tiled bathing room by the little alcove where she had broken the mirror. The shattered mirror had been replaced by a painting of a sunlit sea, all evidence of her outburst scoured away. But Sansa, dropping down to the floor one morning, found a few drops of blood on the carpet and felt oddly satisfied by them.

 

The nights were very bad. She lay awake, half in terror of a knock at her door, half in terror at being left alone in the dark and quiet.

 

She thought of Elyn, twisting and screaming in the arms of the tattooed guard—and worse, of the sudden way that she had gone dead-eyed and limp.

 

Poor Elyn. If not for the war she would have been married off by now to some prosperous young associate of her father’s, with a house of her own and a fat baby or two tugging at her skirts.

 

Elyn, like Sansa, had been raised to a life of convention and comfort. They had been taught to host tea parties, to plan menus, to curtsy and smile and match their dancing slippers to their gowns. They hadn’t been taught to survive.

 

Sansa was grateful that her mother had at least taught her those words. She did not want to think, right now, about what it meant that Catelyn had known them, and had wanted her daughter to know them. It was enough that knowing the words had stopped her from falling under Alec Yin’s power—enough that she had kept her own will.

 

For all the good that it’s done me, Sansa thought. She was a prisoner in a pink-walled, ivory-carpeted cage.

 

She wondered what she would do if Lord Baelish did come knocking at her door. Whatever else he was capable of, he did not seem like the kind of man who would take a woman by force. But Sansa had learned that the kind of man who enjoyed hurting women seldom _seemed_ like that kind of man. And she was his property, he had said so himself.

 

Yet—he had hinted at some other purpose for her. Her memory of their dinner together was hazy, tinged by wine, exhaustion, and fear. But as she sat in her window-seat looking out over the sun-warm garden, as she lay in bed staring up into the darkness, one word kept returning to her, again and again and again, until she felt that it had etched itself into her very soul.

 

_Revenge._

 

*

 

On her seventh day at Mockingbird House, Ros brought news with Sansa’s breakfast tray.

 

“We’re going into town today,” she said, a cheerful smile on her face.

 

“Really?” Sansa’s voice was cool. She had not yet forgiven Ros for leaving her to face Lord Baelish alone.

 

“Yes, to the dressmaker’s.” The housekeeper clapped her hands. “We’re to order you a gown for the Queen’s ball.”

 

Sansa’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not a cheap whore, to be purchased with baubles and dresses.”

 

 _Whore_. It was an ugly word. But Sansa was far beyond the shame she would have once felt at using ugly words.

 

For a moment Ros was silent, as if considering how to respond. “You might not have been cheap,” she said at last. “But in this eyes of this city you’re a whore all the same. _His_ whore. You’re a war prize, a reward for a job well done. It’s better that you get used to the idea.”

 

Sansa laughed. “And how would you know?” She felt her lips stretch into a thin smile. “Am I your replacement? If he thinks I’ll be as _amenable_ as you seem to be, he’s wrong.”

 

As she spoke, the half-healed wound on her hand gave a sudden throb. She wanted to rip it open, to feel the blood coursing over her fingers, warm and stinging. But then she remembered his hand over her mouth, the heady perfume of ether and mint.

 

She clenched her fists, and added, in a voice like a knife’s edge, “Well, all things considered, I suppose I’d rather be an expensive whore than a cheap one.”

 

Ros, her face white and pinched, stood and went to the door. “You know nothing about me,” she said, her vowels thickening and pooling like syrup in a dish. She paused, then added, more crisply, “We’re leaving for the dressmaker’s at two. If you’re not ready to go, I’ll send one of the footmen to help you along.”

 

*

 

The carriage that took them into town was a larger and statelier vehicle than the one that had brought Sansa to Mockingbird House. It was slower, as well: it took them nearly an hour to make it up the hill; a tedious journey made more tedious by the frigid silence in which it was undertaken.

 

The dressmaker’s shop was in a fashionable part of town, far from the bustle and stink of the harbor, the wide, paved avenues populated by frothy little tea shops, haberdasheries, milliners.

 

The inside of the shop was luxuriously decorated, the walls lined in pale blue velvet, the furniture arranged in intimate groups meant to evoke the feeling of a lady’s sitting room rather than a place of commerce.

  

Sansa had been to similar establishments many times in her life. A tailor would come to a lord’s house if summoned, but the best dressmakers made you come to them.

 

There was someone else in the entry as they went in: a black-haired girl, pretty but sulky-faced, pulling on a pair of sapphire-colored satin gloves edged with red lace. Once upon a time, Sansa reflected, she would have thought this girl the most impressive thing in the world, and spent the entire carriage ride home begging her mother for a pair of gloves exactly like hers.

 

The black-haired girl tilted her head to one side, considering Sansa coldly. “I don’t know you,” she said.

 

Sansa smiled. This girl knew exactly who she was. That was why she had lingered here, waiting to get a look at her. It would give her and her friends something to talk about at tea.

 

“Madame Merle, this was meant to be a private appointment,” Ros said, addressing a tall, smartly dressed woman whom Sansa had identified as the proprietress. “Lord Baelish mentioned it specifically,” she pressed. “Miss Alayne is just getting over a fever; she was hardly up to leaving the house at all.”

 

“My apologies,” the dressmaker said, politely but unconvincingly. She had arranged this accidental meeting, of course: gossip was good for business. She smiled at Sansa, then turned to the black-haired girl. “My lady, this is Alayne Stone. Miss Alayne, this is Lady Reena Yin, the wife of Corporal Alec Yin. A great hero to our city.”

 

So this was the handsome young officer’s wife, Sansa thought.

 

Lady Reena had taken out a silk handkerchief and was holding it delicately over her mouth and nose, as if it had been announced that Sansa was carrying the plague. “A fever?” she murmured. “How unfortunate.”

 

“I’m feeling stronger each day, I thank you, my lady,” Sansa said, as if the other woman had behaved properly and asked after her health. A subtle dig, to be sure, but it was not lost on Lady Reena; she stiffened, almost imperceptibly.

 

“I’d heard you were pretty,” she said, looking at Sansa with renewed interest. “Although I didn’t doubt it: he paid a fortune for you, you know. Very shocking. Our Lord Baelish is quite the notorious bachelor, you see, very busy, always travelling. Not much time for _pleasure_.”

 

Sansa looked down, schooling her features into a look of polite confusion meant to discourage further comments in this vein.

 

“Well, _Alayne_ ,” said Lady Reena. “It is clear that you are a gentleman’s daughter; you have manners, at least, unlike some of the other recent additions to our city.” She let out a trilling laugh. “I am having a ladies’ luncheon at my home, Saturday next. I’ll send a man around with an invitation.”

 

“Miss Alayne is still feeling very poorly,” Ros put in.

 

Lady Reena cast the housekeeper a withering look, and said, again, “I’ll send a man around with an invitation.” Then she tossed back her head and swept out of the shop, trailed by two giggling maids.

 

“Lady Reena is an excellent customer,” said Madame Merle.

 

Sansa, understanding that this was meant as an apology, said, “I’m sure she is.”

 

“Now, Alayne,” said the dressmaker, leading her deeper into the shop, to a small sitting area arranged with a settee and several delicate chairs. “With your hair, I think you would look lovely in lavender—or perhaps blue. Red is so unusual, isn’t it? You can’t get that fine coppery color with dye, either.” She snapped her fingers, and a nervous-looking girl about Sansa’s own age appeared from behind a curtain. “Bring us tea, Marta, and some biscuits as well. Quickly, please.”

 

Ros said, “He wants her in green and black.”

 

Madame Merle raised her eyebrows. “Truly?” She bit her lower lip, considering the idea. “Well, my dear, those colors will look very well on you, too—yes, dark green, like a forest nymph. With a black velvet sash, I think. Perhaps slightly off the shoulder?” She paused as Marta set down the tea tray. Passing Sansa a steaming cup, she smiled secretively. “I must say, my dear, if he’s already dressing you in the colors of his house . . . you must have pleased him very much.”

 

*

 

The measurements taken, and the plans made, they returned to Mockingbird House.

 

They were silent, but it was a different kind of silence, somehow. As they pulled into the drive, Sansa said, “You’re right: I don’t know anything about you. Or about what your life has been.”

 

Ros, looking out the window, reached over to pat her hand. Abruptly, she asked, “Has he touched you?”

 

“No.” Sansa closed her eyes. “Will he?”

 

Ros was silent as the carriage bumped and jolted. Then she said, “I don’t know. All these years living in his house, and I don’t know him at all.”

 

*

 

Late that night, Sansa lay in bed, thinking of Elyn again, remembering the girl crying and talking about her family. What had been her kitten’s name? Snowflake? No—Snowball. It had been a pure white kitten, Elyn had said, very fluffy, with bright blue eyes. Her father had brought it down to the breakfast table on her sixteenth name day, a little red ribbon tied around its neck.

 

Why am I thinking about these things? Sansa wondered. It’s stupid. They’re all dead, anyway, the kitten, and Elyn’s father, and probably Elyn, too—

 

Just then, the handle on her bedroom door turned, with a small _click_.

 

Sansa went absolutely still, struggling to keep her breathing soft and even.

 

She knew at once that it was him, even with her eyes closed. She could smell him: clean mint and cold night air, and something else, something that smelled like the view from his study, bright and dark, wild and vast and strange. 

She waited, every nerve tingling, for the mattress to sag under his weight, but he just stood there, close enough to the edge of the bed for her to feel the heat radiating his body. Then, very briefly, she felt his hand brush her cheek.

 

There was a soft sound that might have been him exhaling. Then he was gone, and she was alone in the dark once more.


	5. Ships and Roses, Daggers and Rings

It was still dark when Ros shook her awake. Sansa sat straight up, heart thundering, fists clutching at the quilt.

 

For a moment, Ros had been her mother, coming to tell her that the rebel forces had breached the northern gate.

 

 _We have planned for this_ , she heard her mother saying, _there is a carriage, waiting to take you and your sister to your grandfather. Riverrun is far from the capital, and well fortified. There is nothing to fear, darling._

Even now, remembering the look in Catelyn’s blue eyes, a dark mirror of her own, Sansa wondered if her mother had believed it. They had not yet put a mile between themselves and the city walls before a rebel platoon had closed in.

 

“Alayne,” Ros whispered, touching her arm. “Alayne, are you all right? You’re white as a ghost.”

 

Sansa took a deep breath. You are far from the capital, she told herself. You are in Venosa, at Mockingbird House.

 

The dangers here were subtler but not less. Sansa thought of Lord Baelish’s eyes shifting in the candlelight; of the vicious precision of his voice, like a razor parting flesh, as he pronounced the word _revenge._

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just a nightmare.”

 

“He wants you on the roof,” Ros said, smoothing back the quilt. She was still in her dressing gown, her auburn hair hanging in a braid over one shoulder.

  
Sansa rubbed her eyes. “What? On the roof?”

 

The housekeeper handed her a heavy wool sweater. “On the roof. Now. He just got back a few hours ago, and he’s in one of his moods . . .”

 

Sansa, pulling the sweater over her head, was grateful that her face was hidden.

 

They ascended the narrow, twisting staircase that led to his study. But Ros walked past the study door to the far end of the hall, where she unlocked a small metal door.

 

The door opened onto a brick shaft lined with iron footholds. Sansa stepped inside and looked up to see a square of purplish sky perhaps fifteen feet overhead.

 

Ros poked her head into the shaft. “Be careful,” she said. “It gets windy up there.”

 

The iron holds were very cold, and Sansa’s hands were half-frozen and aching by the time she reached the top. She found herself standing on a kind of metal platform bolted to the roof. The platform was at the back of the house, behind the roof-ridge, and thus invisible from the road.

 

It was a clear, cold morning. The sky was a deep violet, still star-dappled; the horizon a rind of pale pink with the harbor spreading darkly below.

 

Sansa took a deep breath, and then another, and felt a pleasant ache rise in her lungs. “Lord Baelish,” she said.

 

He had been bent over an instrument; at her greeting, he straightened and ran a hand through his hair. He was wearing leather breeches and a wool sweater like her own. He looked tired; disheveled, slightly disreputable. There were shadows about his eyes and mouth.

 

He looks human, she thought, rubbing her hands together. That’s the main difference. This version of her captor was less frightening then the angry lord, or the brooding fairy king, but no more fathomable.

 

Shivering slightly, she wondered, suddenly, what she looked like to him.

 

“Come here,” he said. “I want you to look through the scope.”

 

She peered through the scope, suddenly aware of the mess of her hair, and slippers poking out from beneath her nightgown. “Oh,” she said, with some surprise. “It’s a spyglass! My brothers had one.”

 

“It’s a telescope,” he said, sounding faintly amused. “Much more powerful than a spyglass.”

 

“The image is blurry, my lord.”

 

“Petyr,” he said absently, and, reaching around her, adjusted a dial. “Look again.” The wind was blowing her unbound hair. Sansa tried, unsuccessfully, to tuck the unruly locks into the collar of her sweater. After a moment he gathered her hair himself, smoothing it back with surprising gentleness, and held it in one hand so that she could look.

 

“Tell me what you see,” he said again. His voice was very close to her ear; his breath pulsed on the nape of her neck.

 

Sansa exhaled, sharply. She hadn’t realized that she was holding her breath. “I see a ship.”

 

“And?” he prompted.

 

“It’s . . . it looks like a light ship; a pleasure cruiser, perhaps. No markings on the sails; that is odd.” Rather like the carriage that brought me to Mockingbird House, she thought, chewing her bottom lip. “But there are crates on the deck, and the hull is sitting very low. And this seems a strange time to try to anchor. Why not wait for first light? But they don’t mean to wait: that’s clear. The crew is swarming all over the deck. And there are too many of them for such a small ship, I think.”

 

She straightened.

 

His mouth curved, and he tugged very slightly on the mass of hair in his hand. “Why not wait for first light?”

 

Sansa looked out over the harbor. “Because they don’t want anyone to see what they’re unloading.”

 

“That ship,” he said, “is a pleasure cruiser belonging to the Yin family. It was a wedding gift from Alec Yin to his new wife. And it is currently weighted down with thirty-six hundred high-powered flintlock muskets from Anwan.”

 

Sansa gasped. “Thirty-six hundred? That’s enough to outfit a small army.”

 

“Yes, it is.” He had begun to braid her hair, his fingers moving as skillfully and quickly as any ladies’ maid.

 

“Is it even . . . legal for a citizen to own that much weaponry?”

 

“Under empiric law? No. However—the empire does not exist, at least as present.” He tied off the braid with a bit of loose wool from his sleeve. “But I still do not think that our fair Queen would be happy to have her General outfitting a personal guard that outstrips her own city watch, do you?”

 

“No. Especially not when most of her army is several weeks away, fortifying its position in the capital and fighting skirmishes on the eastern border.” At his look, she shrugged. “Two of your gardeners were talking under my window the other day. So you think it’s the General, then, and not his son or his wife acting independently?” From what Sansa had seen of Lady Reena, she seemed perfectly capable of arms smuggling. She shivered.

 

“I don't know," said Lord Baelish, "but I aim to find out. And now, I think, it is time to go inside.”

 

*

 

Sansa descended first, with Lord Baelish following to lock the hatch.

 

She went to go down the stairs but he put a hand on her arm. “And where do you think you’re going? Lessons will continue in my study.”

 

“Now?” she said, rather stupidly.

 

“Now,” he said. “Don't worry; I’ll have some breakfast provisions sent up.”

 

*

 

He immediately set to work making a pot of coffee on the small stove tucked into one corner of the room.

 

Sansa watched, fascinated: she had never seen any man, much less a lord, undertake such a humble domestic task. But he was adept: measuring, leveling, pouring. Within ten minutes he had the coffee brewing and a fire catching in big stone fireplace. A few minutes after that, a platter piled high with bacon, eggs, and fresh fruit arrived on the dumbwaiter.

 

Sansa tore into the food. She hadn’t had much of an appetite for some time now, but today breakfast tasted unbelievably good to her, the bacon thick, crisped, salty; the eggs creamy; the fruit juicy and sweet. In between bites she gulped at the hot, bitter coffee. The old Sansa, whose preferred drink was warm chocolate with cream and heaping spoonfuls of sugar, would have hated it. The new Sansa liked it. It burned her throat, cleansing and scouring like the cold sea air.

 

Lord Baelish watched her eat, his eyes moving over her as if she were a valuable animal whose appearance required constant monitoring. His gaze was as detached and distant as his manner. She half-wondered if she had imagined him coming into her room last night; the hand on her cheek, the sudden intake of breath.

 

“Are you sitting comfortably?” he asked, after a few moments.

 

She nodded, her mouth full of strawberry.

 

“Then we’ll begin.”

 

*

 

The first lesson, he told her, would be centered on basic illusionry. They would start very small: making a red flower appear pink. Next, perhaps, they might try making a silk-edged handkerchief look like a lace-edged handkerchief.

 

He set a rose on the table in front of her, along with a fountain pen and a piece of parchment, and said, “write down everything you see. Like with the ship.”

 

Sansa frowned. “I thought you were going to teach me how to bring people under my power.”

 

It was the first direct reference that either of them had made to the strange dinner conversation. But if she had been hoping to set him off-balance, she was disappointed.

 

“I am,” he said. He seemed to be searching for something on his desk, which was a mess of books, papers, and instruments.

 

“I don’t see what writing about a flower has to do with that.”

 

He abandoned his search, coming to rest one hand on the back of her chair. “Do you remember that little illusion on your hand, the other evening?” he asked.

 

“Yes, of course.”

 

“How do you think I did that?”

 

She let her eyes drift towards the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

 

He leaned over her. “I studied your hand, Sansa, until I knew every detail. Did you tutor ever make you memorize a poem? Yes? It’s like that. You must know each individual part—and also how the parts fit together into a whole. Then, and only then . . .” He moved his hand over the flower. Where the rose had been there was a knife, a vicious-looking dagger, black-handled with a gold blade.

 

She looked up at him, astonished.

 

“That is much more difficult than making a bandaged, wounded hand look like a perfectly intact hand,” he said, as if they were talking about the price of tea. “A rose to a dagger: I had to have both perfectly in my mind, you see, and to hold them both there at the same time.” He moved his hands over the flower again: a rose. Again: a dagger. “Illusions are difficult to maintain for long periods, however; the glamour fades with the caster’s attention.”

 

Sansa stared dreamily at the dagger. In her mind’s eye the sharpness of the blade and the blood-red of the rose petals mingled. She imagined moving the tip of the blade across his throat . . .

 

“Why did you do it?” she heard herself ask.

 

He went very still. “Why did I do what?”

 

“Kill Sir Gerrin. You could have persuaded him to forget what he knew, couldn’t you?”

 

“He allowed you to be starved and beaten, he sold you to the highest bidder, and you have pity for him?” He tilted her chin so that she was looking up at him. “Don’t. Pity makes us soft when we should be hard, makes us falter when we should strike.”

 

“That’s not an answer,” she said.

 

“It is,” he said softly, and she felt something in her chest drop precipitously.

 

“Power is knowledge, Sansa: you must learn to study people and things just as closely as you studied that ship through the telescope. You must learn to do it all the time, without thinking. When you enter a room, for instance: you take in the doors and windows, every detail of the furnishings, how the people in the room have arranged themselves. First you see what everyone else sees and then you see what is actually there. Do you understand?”

 

She nodded, though she didn’t, really.

 

“Now—a good illusion holds up to pressure. This was a sloppy one.” He picked up the dagger, pinching the hilt between index finger and thumb. “See?”

 

He dropped it, and as the blade-point hit the floor the dagger collapsed into a softness of red petals.

 

He put another rose in front of her. “Get to work.”

 

*

 

After half an hour, she had generated a long list of attributes, detailing the peculiar dark red shade of the petals as well as their number and velvety texture; the tiny bristling hairs covering the stem; the black tips of the thorns.

 

He sat down next to her and picked up the parchment. “Too vague. Good. Good. Vague. Incorrect: there are 45 petals, not 43. Good.”

 

“Let’s try, then, shall we? I will help you the first time.” He bid her put the rose between her palms, then closed his hands over hers.

 

She looked down at their hands, her face heating; her own hands trembled a little. “My lord—I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”

 

“You do know,” he said sharply. “It is in your blood.”

 

Time passed: to Sansa it felt an infinity. The room was silent and still. She closed her eyes. There was the heat of his thinly-calloused hands. There was the smell of mint, and coffee, and that other, indefinable thing, redolent of vast open spaces. There was the velvet softness of the petals. There was a thorn, digging slightly into the tender skin of her palm.

 

Who was this man, this stranger? What were they doing?

 

There was a sensation of building heat, and Sansa had the curious sense that something was rising up in her, something green and alive, and something was rising up in him as well, as if in answer, but his _something_ was dark; not a dingy darkness, but clear, like the night sky, or like a crystal against black velvet.

 

Two streams, one cool and green, one warm and black, twining together, braiding in an alternating pattern of light and dark, dark and light. The feeling of heat grew more intense, until Sansa almost cried out. He squeezed, and she felt the thorn pierce the center of her palm, and then it all exploded, flowing out of her, like water from a shattered dam.

 

She saw the thing the flower wanted to be. The image came to her complete: a ring, as beautiful as the rose and the dagger had been. A gold band mounted with a single stone, an emerald, cloudy and cut with black veins. Their hands burst apart, and something clattered onto the table.

 

All was ordinary again, except for the object on the table, which had been a flower and was now a ring, exactly like the one she had seen in her mind’s eye. And except for the feeling Sansa had, light and rushing.

 

It took her a moment to identify it: happiness. Not full-grown, only a tiny infant glimmering. Still.

 

They looked at each other. He smiled, then, a real smile; the first he had ever given her.

 

She laughed, a little shakily. "I only meant to turn it pink."

 

He stood, taking the ring to the window to inspect it in the light. For a long moment he was silent. Then, without turning, he said, “Get out.” His voice was strange, low and raw-sounding.

 

“My lord—” she began, startled, the tiny happiness draining out of her. “I—”

 

But the mask was off. He rounded on her, roaring, “GET OUT!”

 

Tears streaming down her face, Sansa ran out of the room. She did not stop running until she was back in her own room, the door locked from the inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading. And for all of the comments and kudos--seeing them really keeps me motivated! <3 (Also, sorry about the longer wait between chapters . . . I had a really busy week, schoolwork-wise.)


	6. An Invitation

Later that day Sansa was drowsing in the sitting room. Ros was draped over a settee, eating chocolates and reading one of her romance novels.

 

The housekeeper had invited Sansa to take afternoon tea with her, claiming that she got lonely when it rained. Sansa did not really believe this—Ros seemed to her entirely self-sufficient—but she had no excuse, and in any case she was growing rather tired of her bedchamber.

 

At Ros’s suggestion, they had played several hands of whist. Then Sansa, pleading fatigue—it wasn’t a lie; she felt oddly vague, sleepy, weak in her limbs—had curled up on one of the overstuffed armchairs to watch the rain. The damp greenery pressed up against the windows gave everything in the room a watery, greenish cast, as if they were underwater, and the constant thrum of the rain was pleasant, soothing, almost hypnotizing.

 

Sansa was half-asleep, worrying absent-mindedly at the bandage on her right hand and thinking of roses and daggers and rings when Ros said, quite suddenly, “His family isn’t from Venosa, you know.”

 

Sansa straightened, turning to look at Ros.

 

She had set aside her book and was looking out the window, her gaze unfocused and remote, as if she were seeing something further distant than the rain-gilded garden.

 

“Where are they from?” Sansa asked. She spoke softly, and not too eagerly, sensing that Ros might be easily spooked into silence.

 

Ros touched her brow, and Sansa for the first time noticed the faint, silvery scar crossing her hairline. “They have an estate,” she said. “Áth Dara.” The name meant nothing to Sansa, but it struck her that it sounded very like the words her mother had made her memorize all those years ago.

 

“It’s far away, in the western borderlands,” Ros continued. “A wild, lonely place. The empire never bothered to conquer it. Some think that’s not accident. The people from that part of the country are . . . strange.”

 

Her eyes focused. Looking directly at Sansa, she said, “It’s one thing to have a touch of what we call the gift. I do, myself: the tea I pour is always hot; my hair always holds a curl. But he—he is something else. Something far more dangerous. Do you understand, Alayne?”

 

“I—”

 

But Sansa was interrupted by a thundering on the stairs. A moment later Lord Baelish came crashing through the doorway, beautifully dressed in a blue tailcoat and jacket.

 

His eyes found Sansa. “He’s coming,” he said.

 

Ros stiffened. “Who?”

 

“Yin.”

 

Ros sprang up, and Lord Baelish took her place on the settee, assuming a sprawling posture that seemed utterly at odds with his mood.

 

“Come here,” he told Sansa. At her hesitation, he snapped, “Your behavior over the next half hour is a matter of life and death: is that motivation enough for you? Good; I’m pleased you think so.” He arranged her so that she was leaning against him, her legs draped partially over his lap. “Here, rest your head on my shoulder. Life and death, Alayne; life and death.” He tilted her chin. “Look at me, now, try to appear devoted; and stupid, if you can. Good, good, that’s a very pretty blush.”

 

The front door bells chimed out.

 

“Tea,” he snapped at Ros, and the housekeeper hurried out, taking the old tray, scattered with biscuit crumbs and chocolate wrappers, with her.

 

A moment later, one of the footman announced, “Corporal Alec Yin, my lord.”

 

Corporal Alec Yin stood in the doorway, smoothing back his rain-damp hair. He looked, Sansa thought, just as he had in her prison cell: uniform neat, medal polished, shoulders squared.

 

His strange silvery eyes moved over the slightly old-fashioned, slightly worn room, and seemed amused by what they found.

 

“Baelish,” he said, with rude familiarity, “I say, this place could do with a bit of sprucing. A woman’s touch, that’s what it needs.” His smile sharpened. “And look—here’s a woman.”

 

Lord Baelish, busily wrapping a strand of Sansa’s hair around his wrist, did not pause to look up at his guest. “Why Corporal Yin,” he said. “Has the Queen granted you time off from being hero and savior to go a-calling? And you thought of me! Mockingbird House is flattered by your presence, of course.”

 

Corporal Yin ignored this speech. “In truth, I came to deliver an invitation for . . . Alayne, is it? My wife tells me that she would be delighted if you would join her luncheon party on Saturday.” He smiled. “You and Lord Baelish both, of course.”

 

Sansa, staring at Lord Baelish’s snowy white cravat, did her best to look stupid.

 

Lord Baelish picked up her hand, and began to move his thumb over the inside of her wrist. “Alayne is getting over a fever,” he said. “And we’re quite enjoying private life at present.”

 

Corporal Yin flicked out his coattails and sat, either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that he had not been invited to do so. “I can see that,” he said, musingly. “Well—perhaps you will change your mind. Reena does so hate to be disappointed.” He paused, as if he had just remembered something. “Ah, Alayne, I am also meant to send the regards of a Miss Elyn Lanwood. I understand you two are former acquaintances. Miss Lanwood has lately entered my wife’s service.”

 

Sansa stiffened, started to rise, but Lord Baelish pressed his thumb warningly into the center of her wrist.

 

Ros appeared with the tea tray. “Your tea, my lord,” she said, in her most deferential tones.

 

Corporal Yin leered at Ros as she bent over the table. “I say, you do like pretty red-heads, don’t you, Baelish? Consistency: I like that in a man.”

 

Ros hurried out, and Lord Baelish laughed. “No one has ever accused me of consistency before,” he said. “Oh, look. Ros has only brought enough tea and toast for two. What a shame.”

 

“You know,” said Corporal Yin, “I almost get the sense you’re trying to get rid of me.” He leaned forward. “Now—why might that be? Is there perhaps more to the lovely Alayne than meets the eye?”

 

Lord Baelish had been paging through Ros’s book; now he tossed it aside, rolling his eyes. “You know what they say about war,” he drawled. “It makes men dreadfully boring in times of peace. Why waste time on schemes and suspicion, when there are so many . . . pleasures to be had?”

 

With that he ducked under the curtain of Sansa’s hair and pressed his lips to the tender place beneath her ear. With the other hand, he waved off Corporal Yin, who gave him a disgusted look and said, “You’re useless, Baelish. Nonetheless, there is a matter of some urgency that I would like to discuss with you. If you can be stirred from your _pleasures_ for a few hours, that is.” He stood. “I hope to see both of you at my house on Saturday afternoon.”

 

Then, with a short, mocking bow, and without waiting to be escorted by the footman, Corporal Yin left.

 

When the front door slammed shut, Lord Baelish pushed Sansa off his lap. Then he began to swear, enthusiastically and at length, using several words that Sansa had never heard before, either singly or in combination.

 

“What did he want?” she asked, when he seemed to have reached a stopping point.

 

“To see you, of course,” he replied. “You resisted his persuasion, back at the prison. Therefore, something important about you must have been overlooked. He just doesn’t know what it is yet.”

 

His eyes suddenly narrowed. They were green, today; a bright, hard green, and there was a speculative expression in them that Sansa didn’t like. “I imagine that anyone who wanted to work persuasion on you would have a very difficult time of it.”

 

 _Even you?_ The question hung in the air, unspoken.

 

“I want you in my study by seven o’clock tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’m afraid the holiday is over. Now the real work begins.”

 

*

 

When the door opened, Sansa was sitting in her window-seat, looking out over the garden, bleached and glittering in the moonlight. She turned, expecting Ros, but it was Lord Baelish.

 

He was wearing a dark robe over his night-clothes, and there was a candle in his hand, which he set carefully on the night-table.

 

She looked away, her heart thudding. “What do you want?”

 

There was the softest of clicks as the door shut.

 

“Sansa,” he said, and that was all.

 

“Go away,” she said, her lips trembling, “Please.”

 

“Servants talk,” he said. “A truly besotted man would be here every night. We both have our parts to play, sweet: I, a useless, besotted fop; you, my pretty, empty-headed prize. If we play them well, people won’t ask questions about Alayne Stone. They won’t ask questions, for instance, about who her parents are, or about why, exactly, I was willing to pay a truly outrageous sum for her.”

 

He picked up the silver-handled brush from the vanity table and came to sit beside her. At first she shuddered; but the gentle, even strokes reminded her of how her mother used to brush her hair after her evening bath, and slowly, slowly, slowly she allowed her clenched fists to open, her eyelids to flutter shut.

 

“Such beautiful hair,” she heard him say, very low. He had set down the brush, and was running his fingers through the strands. She felt him gather her hair up in a mass, lift it from her neck, and then release it so that it fell down her back.

 

There was a strange, knotted feeling in her chest, a beating ache from which she was certain there could be no relief.

 

She heard herself sigh, and whisper, “Tell me about the ring.” The moonlight seemed to draw the question from her; she felt she could almost see the words float, silvery and soft, from her lips to his ears.

 

His hands stilled. Then, suddenly, in quite a different voice, he said, “Let’s practice.”

 

Sansa retrieved the candle, and, as he watched, his face dark and expressionless, she changed the flame from blue to purple to red to green.

 

At last, exhausted and shaking, she said. “I can’t. It makes me so tired . . .”

 

“That’s normal, at first,” he said, taking the candle from her unsteady hands. He led her to the bed, then slipped into the chair beside the pillow. “I once fell asleep in the middle of a formal dinner. My face fell right into a pile of steamed peas. My father was very angry; my tutor even more so, because he was blamed.”

 

“Your tutor taught you illusionary and persuasion?” Sansa murmured.

 

“At first. Later I was sent to the sorcerer’s academy on Iona.”

 

“There’s a sorcerer’s academy?” The words came out slightly slurred; she was so very sleepy.

 

“Yes, on the isle of Iona, far west of here.” He drew a little breath. “Let me tell you a story,” he said, “about how the academy came to be. Once, on a long-ago summer night, a shepherd boy was walking with his flock over the dark hills when he saw a star fall . . .”

 

But she was already asleep.


	7. Uncertain Arts

The next morning dawned chilly and damp.

 

For a while Sansa lay watching the play of light and shadow across the ceiling. From somewhere distant in the house she heard low female voices: the maids, murmuring to one another as they lit fires in rooms that no one ever used.

 

Eventually there was a knock at her door. It was one of the maids, a Rhenish girl called Maire.

 

Usually Ros came to wake and dress her, but according to Maire the housekeeper was “feeling quite poorly.” Sansa doubted this very much. The maid looked around the room expectantly, as if hoping to find her employer still abed, or hiding behind the curtains.

 

She took a long time making the bed, then turned to Sansa, a sly smile on her face. “The cream wool, my lady? With the blue kirtle?” She giggled. “I think that would look very pretty. Very pretty indeed.”

 

 _Servants talk_ , he had said. Well, it seemed they did.

 

“No,” Sansa said severely. “The brown check.” It was the plainest dress in the wardrobe.

 

“Is my lady _happy_ this morning?” asked Maire, as she brushed Sansa’s hair.

 

“Oh, do shut up,” Sansa snapped, grabbing the brush. “Go away. I’ll finish myself.”

 

Quickly, she plaited her hair, splashed some cold water on her face, and set off for the fourth floor.

 

She had begun to suspect that there was something strange about the back staircase—that it was guarded or warded in some invisible way. As she climbed she felt that she was stepping through something, a kind of veil that brushed at her face and palms, and, recognizing her, allowed her to pass.

 

At the carved door she hesitated, but before she could knock Lord Baelish called, “Come in.”

 

She entered to find him standing at the window, his hands laid loosely on the sill.

 

“Good morning, Alayne,” he said, courteous but cold, as if they were acquaintances passing each other on the street. “I trust you slept well?”

 

She remembered, suddenly, his hands in her hair, and looked away, as if he could read the thought in her face.

 

He offered her coffee, which she accepted, and then sat her at the table with a book.

 

“Read,” he said.

 

“But I want to practice,” she protested. “I was thinking about trying—”

 

“Read,” he said again, and then settled at his desk.

 

The book was called _The Threefold Fire: Notes on Illusionry & the other Uncertain Arts_. It was a kind of primer, clearly intended for the beginning student. Sansa wanted to ask Lord Baelish if it had been his textbook, but he was writing what looked like an important letter, and there was something in his manner that made her reluctant to interrupt him.

 

She turned back to her own book. The author, a Sir Arnoldas de Nova, seemed like a bit of a prig. The first few chapters were punctuated with anecdotes about terrible things that had befallen foolish students who attempted to work spells beyond their abilities.

 

She was so absorbed that she didn’t look up again until the dumbwaiter bell chimed. Morning tea: fresh sourdough rolls, still hot from the oven; a bowl of lemon curd jam flecked with dried rose petals; a plate of steaming soft-boiled eggs; a pat of butter molded into the shape of a bird; a tumbler of grapefruit juice sweetened with honey.

 

Lord Baelish, bent over his parchment, ignored the bell; so Sansa retrieved the tray, fixed herself a plate, and kept reading. A while later, pausing to lick a bit of jam from her thumb before she turned the page, she glanced up to see that he was studying her with a cold, appraising stare.

 

“What have you learned?” he asked.

 

“That men think they know more than they do and make an awful mess of things.”

 

“Don’t be clever,” he said.

 

“You’re clever,” she retorted.

 

“Do you want to be like me?”

 

Sansa stared down at _The Threefold Fire_ , frowning. “I want—I want—” She broke off, and, very carefully, rolled up her right sleeve. “They didn’t touch my face,” she said, and then, because it was easier than what came next, she repeated, “They didn’t touch my face.”

 

He watched her, his own face expressionless but waiting.

 

“When they pulled me from the carriage, I didn’t cry. I wanted to be brave, you see, like the girls in songs. Like my lady mother. But their commander said, ‘I bet she’d be prettier with some tears on her face.’ Then he cut my arm with his dagger—little, shallow slices, all in a row.” She swallowed. “He kept going until I cried. He seemed to enjoy it so much that I thought he might kill me after all. I half-hoped he would.” She was silent for a long moment, looking at her fists clenched on the table, the knuckles white as bare bone. Then she looked up at him, meeting his dark, unreadable gaze, and said, “I don’t want to fear them. I want them to fear me.”

 

He rose from his chair and went to the window. “There is no such thing as safety,” he said. “Not in a person. Not in a place. Magic has no loyalty to you. The dark arts will not love you. And sorcery can turn against you just as a person can.”

 

“I understand,” she said.

 

“Do you?” He turned, a shadow of a smile crossing his face. “I thought that I understood, once.”

 

He pointed at the candelabra sitting in the center of the table. “Change that into a sword.”

 

“But—I don’t—I haven’t—”

 

“It’s been sitting in front of you all morning.”

 

Still she hesitated, so he drew nearer and said, “You want to make them fear you?” He leaned forward on his palms. “ _Do it_.”

 

She closed her eyes, trying to summon an image of the candelabra. But when she held out her hands, he snapped, “No.”

 

She opened her eyes. “No?”

 

“Without hand gestures,” he said. “You must learn to cast while seeming to be thinking of nothing more than your dining companion’s inane conversation, or the fineness of the wine, or when the fish course will be served. Now: try again. No closing your eyes. No waving your hands about.”

 

Sansa smiled at him, then, a small, tremulous smile, as if she were trying to get up her courage. Her face remembered how: the slight tensing of bone and sinew, the little drop of her chin.

 

She kept her eyes on him the whole time, then said, smugly, “There.”

 

Where the candelabra had been was a massive silver sword. Even from here she could tell that the sword was an ugly, shoddy thing; it looked more like a child’s drawing of a sword than a real weapon. Oh well, she thought: he hadn’t said to change it into a _good_ sword.

 

Surprise skipped over his face and vanished like a stone in deep water. Then he said, sharply, “If I found that in my hand in a duel I’d count myself dead before the first strike. Now change it back. Keep going until you have something that looks more like a sword. And until you can manage it without gripping your back teeth and squinting like you’ve just bitten down on a lemon.”

 

*

 

After that he disappeared for three quarters of an hour, returning with ruffled hair and the smell of the sea air on him. Without a word, he sat back down at his desk.

 

They worked through lunch, stopping only long enough for Sansa to eat the cheese and fruit that came up on the dumbwaiter.

 

After lunch he had her alternate sessions of reading with short bursts of changing objects into other, similarly sized objects—a cup into an inkwell; a pen into a feather; a candle into a letter opener. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until she was bleary-eyed and snappish.

 

As afternoon stretched into evening, long blue shadows filled the room, the ships in the harbor began to light their lanterns, and Sansa found that she could hardly keep her eyes open at all.

 

She propped her chin on her hands and watched the bobbing lights.

 

“Change the chair,” he said, without glancing up from his book, a linen-bound tome with a painted spine. He pointed at one of the big leather armchairs near the fireplace.

 

“The chair?” she said, the words loose in her mouth. “It’s too big. I’m too tired. And I’m _hungry_. It’s nearly dinner time.” Even to her own ears she sounded childish, but the magic frayed at her, leaving her porous, exposed, stretched thin as copper wire.

 

He came around the back of her chair, leaning over her just as he had that first night. “Change it,” he said. “Change it into anything you want.”

 

Sansa shoved back her chair, feeling it hit his shins and not caring. She stood, closed her eyes, and tried to draw on the knotted energy at her center.

 

“Life and death, Alayne,” he murmured. “Life and death.”

 

“It isn’t,” she protested, hating the sound of the false name.

 

“It is. And what did I say about closing your eyes?”

 

She felt something pressing against her throat. Slowly, she opened her eyes.

 

He was holding a dagger to her throat.

 

“What are you doing?” she managed, her heart beating a panicked staccato.

 

“Change the chair,” he said.

 

“ _I can’t!_ ”

 

He pressed a little harder, his head tilting, his gaze drifting down past her lips to the place where the blade kissed her neck.

 

“Change the chair,” he said again, almost crooningly, his voice both menace and caress. The smell of mint was strong; too strong. She tried to shake her head. For an instant the room reeled around her; and she was standing in a vast overgrown garden, stars drifting overhead, blue mountains rearing up around her, the air sharp with the smell of cold and dark and stone.

 

 _He is something different_ , she heard Ros saying. _Something far more dangerous_.

 

He was a stranger, she realized. She had no idea who he was; what he wanted; what he would or would not do. She felt the distance between them to be a physical thing; an empty, wind-swept plain, a dark and writhing sea.

 

She tried again. Nothing happened. She was like a wick that had burned down too low to catch fire.

 

Panic came on her, then, a rushing, charged darkness that roared through her like a wave; a beating, pinching emptiness, full of blood on cobblestones; Elyn’s screams; and other things, worse things.

 

When she felt the blade push in it was almost a relief.

 

But when her hands went to her neck, there was no knife, no blood; only a slight, tickling softness. He was holding a feather to her throat.

 

He looked down at her, and she saw in his eyes not pity or regret, but an utter, heart-cold emptiness.

 

She lunged at him. She got in one solid hit, but he was quick, and much stronger than he looked. He caught one fist, then the other. In two steps he had backed her against the table edge.

 

In their struggle her hair had come loose from its braid, and a few strands hung across her face. He shifted both of her hands into one of his, and brushed it back.

 

“Never do that again,” he said, very softly, into her neck.

 

Her eyes went to where the chair had been. At first she thought that the chair had simply vanished, and it filled her with rage beyond telling, that he had managed to get that much out of her. But then she saw the glint on the rug. Even from this distance she knew what it was: a gold band mounted with a single stone, an emerald, cloudy and cut with black veins. His eyes found the ring at the same time; she saw his expression darken and laughed.

 

For a long, waiting moment there was nothing but their breath, ragged between them, and the low evening call of the gulls.

 

“I hate you,” she spat.

 

He leaned in, then, and pressed his lips to hers. The kiss was brief; no more than two or three of her own quick heart-beats, but when he pulled back, his breast was rising and falling as rapidly as her own.

 

“I hate you, too," he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry--I had planned to post this chapter yesterday, but life got in the way. I hope it was worth the wait!
> 
> Thanks for reading. <3


	8. Thieves and Scoundrels

Lady Reena’s luncheon party was not what Sansa expected.

 

She had not expected to go at all—Lord Baelish seemed to loathe Corporal Yin; and he had refused the invitation in no uncertain terms. Added to this was the question of why _any_ man would want to attend _any_ luncheon party, much less one hosted by the wife of a mortal enemy.

 

The luncheons Sansa had been to with her mother were torturously dull affairs, all stale cucumber sandwiches and lukewarm tea and bored women drinking too much cherry cordial and leering at the footmen.

 

She had said as much to Ros, but the housekeeper had only smiled and said, “Things are different here.”

 

Things _are_ different here, Sansa thought grimly, as the carriage pulled through the gates of the Yin mansion.

 

For one thing, luncheon parties in Venosa took place much later than any respectable person would actually eat lunch: it had been well past six when they left Mockingbird House, the sky already sinking into a cloudy red sunset.

 

Venosan luncheon parties also apparently required dress that Sansa would have thought more suitable for a formal dinner.

 

Lord Baelish, in addition to his customary black breeches and waistcoat, was wearing a rather piratical white silk shirt, and Ros had chosen for Sansa a blue velvet gown that was both more fitted and more low-cut than its wearer would have preferred.

 

In addition to her other reservations about the dress, Sansa had thought it far too elaborate for what she had expected would be a casual afternoon affair, but now, peering through the curtains at the people milling about the courtyard, she could see that the housekeeper had chosen well.

 

The Yin’s guests were decked out like shimmering birds, in jewel-toned satins and spangled silks and embroidered velvets. Some of the women wore headdresses, elaborate, ethereal things constructed out of feathers and bits of voile, and many of the men were wearing masks.

 

Lord Baelish had one, too, a half-mask in plain black leather. As the carriage came to a final, lurching stop, he pulled it on. “Return for us at seven minutes past nine,” he told the driver.

 

Sansa found this specificity odd, but the driver seemed to think nothing of it; he merely nodded, and continued making soothing noises to the horses, who, misliking the commotion, trembled a little in their harnesses.

 

Sansa could sympathize. At the carriage door she hesitated, but Lord Baelish looked at her with a face set like iron, gripped her arm, and yanked.

 

She landed heavily on one foot, much to the amusement of two passing women, who tittered at her from behind their fans.

 

Lord Baelish smiled at them. “I’m afraid my companion has had a bit too much to drink already,” he said. Then, helping Sansa to straighten, he said, quietly, “Life and death, Alayne. Remember your part and play it well. Or I promise you, you will be very sorry before this night is through.”

 

Sansa smoothed her dress. “You’re speaking to me again, my lord?” she asked, all malicious innocence. They had not uttered a word to each other since their argument two days before.

 

“Only to threaten you,” said Lord Baelish mildly.

 

She wanted to snap back, but he squeezed her hand, warningly, and then they were swallowed up by a crowd of merry Venosan aristos.

 

Everything was bright and glittering as a fairy revel: the rosy shadows shimmering on the white brick of the house, the torches flaring and winking in the trees, the flashing wheels of carriages and open-air barouches.

 

And everyone seemed to have something to say to Lord Baelish. He smiled and laughed and nodded, asking the men about their wives or mistresses—often about their wives _and_ their mistresses—and complimenting the women on their gowns.

 

A few people looked at Sansa curiously, but no one addressed her, except for one bright-eyed old woman, who glanced between them before saying, not unkindly, “Well, girl, I can see you don’t belong here.” Then she turned to Lord Baelish. “And where did you find this one, Petyr?”

 

This one? Sansa thought. Had he brought so many other women to Mockingbird House?

 

What was it that Ros had said? _In the eyes of this city you’re a whore all the same._ His _whore._

 

Lord Baelish gave the woman a bow, and the small, quick smile that meant he was annoyed but preferred not to show it. Then he tugged on Sansa’s arm, drawing her through the open double doors and into the hall.

 

It was a cool evening but the house was humid as a greenhouse, and the air smelled of powder and sweat and smoke, laced through with the sharp-sweet odor of wine. In some distant room, a harpsichord and a viola de gamba thundered out a sonata; the music sounded to Sansa’s ears slightly off-key.

 

It was _all_ slightly off-key, somehow. The party was like something from a dream: too loud, too colorful, too close.

 

As they moved deeper into the house—each room seemingly more crowded than the last—they encountered a series of strange scenes. A young woman vomiting into a vase. An inebriated gentleman in the midst of a violent argument with himself. In one beautifully decorated sitting room, two giggling girls shoved past them, pursued by a man whose breeches were partly unlaced.

 

Finally they emerged into a candlelit gallery dominated by a long table laden with tiered platters of cakes and pastries, bowls of shivering custard, an edible village of tiny sugared houses, trees, animals, and people. Next to the table stood an enormous ice sculpture cut into the shape of Itara: the sea goddess leaned forward slightly, offering with one hand a tray covered in glistening oysters, thinly sliced octopus, delicate pink shrimp.

 

Lady Reena spotted them from across the room and hurried over at once.

 

“Alayne!” she cried, taking Sansa’s hands as if they were the best and oldest of friends. “How happy I am to see you. How do you like my party? You see—we Venosans are not so barbaric as you think.” She cocked her head to one side. “You look lovely! Don’t you agree, Lord Baelish?”

 

Lord Baelish looked down at Sansa, his eyes intent on her bare neck and collarbone. “Most vehemently,” he said, in a tone that suggested he had been in intimate contact with every place his eyes touched and some others besides.

 

With some difficulty, Sansa freed her hands from Lady Reena’s grasp. “I was wondering,” she began, ignoring Lord Baelish’s fingers tightening on her forearm. What could he do to her in front of all these people? “That is—your husband mentioned that a Miss Elyn Lanwood has lately entered your service? Is Miss Lanwood here? May I speak with her?”

 

For a bare half-instant, Lady Reena’s pretty mouth went slack. Then she smiled. “Oh,” she said, with an airy wave of her hand. “I’m very sorry—I see Lady Yarl over there—you must excuse me. Ta!”

 

“Don’t do that again,” Lord Baelish hissed, half-leading, half-dragging Sansa out of the room and down a long, dimly lit corridor.

 

“Don’t do what again, my lord?”

 

A passing waiter thrust a glass of champagne at Sansa. Lord Baelish grabbed the glass, tossed it into a potted fern, and pulled her along.

 

A moment later they emerged into a massive ballroom, cunningly constructed out of leaded glass. Above and around them, the sunset was in full blaze, filling the room with shades of pink and red and orange.

 

Sansa possessed herself; but too late. Lord Baelish had seen her gaping; beneath the mask his mouth twitched in amusement.

 

“Why are you wearing that silly mask, anyway?” she asked.

 

His eyes roved over the room; he seemed to be looking for someone. “It is customary to dress in costume for these wretched occasions.” He tapped the mask. “I am a highwayman.”

 

“A highwayman?”

 

“A thief,” he clarified. “A scoundrel, a rogue. A knight of the road, if it please you.”

 

“Is it really a costume, then?”

 

“What did I tell you about being clever?” he asked, his eyes still searching the crowd.

 

“I’m not wearing a costume.”

 

“You are,” he countered. “You’re Belinda.”

 

A cheer went up as the musicians began a waltz.

 

“Belinda?” Sansa repeated. It was so warm; she was glad that he had tossed out the champagne. Her head was already buzzing.

 

“Yes—Bonny Belinda, with roses in her hair? She loved a highwayman named MacHeath—it ended badly for them both, I’m afraid. There’s an old ballad.” He sang a bar, in a surprisingly precise baritone: “ _And there she lay, still on the shore, bonny Belinda, with red roses in her red hair . . ._ ”

 

“You sound more foreign when you sing,” she said. “More northern.”

 

He tweaked a strand of dark red hair gently between index finger and thumb. “Don’t be pert, Belinda,” he said.

 

Then, without another word, he led her out onto the dance floor. The waltz was a five-step: simple enough, but Sansa was still weak from her weeks at sea, and within a few moments she found herself flushed and out of breath. Lord Baelish seemed not to notice or perhaps not to care; he swept her back and forth across the floor, his eyes all the while moving ceaselessly over the crowd of dancers.

 

“If you told me who you were looking for,” she gasped. “I might be able to help look.”

 

“Never mind,” he murmured. “That which we seek . . .”

 

He spun her around so that she could see a dark-haired young man crashing through the crowd, leaving a trail of annoyed dancers in his wake.

 

The young man was costumed in the manner of an Empire general—Sansa, thinking of her father in the same clothing, felt a sharp pang of grief. But her father had never looked like this: the young man’s his collar was soaked with wine, his sash had come undone. His eyes were glassy and his hair hung limply over his forehead.

 

“You think you can hide from me, Baelish, in that mask? You bloody whoreson.”

 

Lord Baelish bowed. “Lord Temperley. I am at your service, as ever.”

 

“You ruined me, you bastard. You and Yin . . . thieves and scoundrels, that’s what you are.” He dropped his glass on the floor, where it shattered. Against the pale marble floor the spilled wine bubbled like blood.

 

At this the ballroom fell silent, every head had turning in their direction.

 

Lord Baelish stepped forward, taking hold of the younger man’s arm. “Not here, Temperley,” he murmured. “Not when you’ve been drinking.”

 

Lord Temperley yanked his arm away. “I’m not . . . damned . . . drunk.”

 

Lord Baelish spread his arms. “Tell me, my friend, what can I do for you? What do you want?”

 

Rage and wine mottled Lord Temperley’s face. “I want my sixty thousand!”

 

“Not possible.”

 

For a moment the young man fingered the handle of the rapier hanging at his waist, and the crowd seemed to hold its collective breath. Then his eyes rolled to Sansa. “I want _her_. For the night. You owe me that much, you and Yin . . . I know things . . .”

 

"Yes, yes," Lord Baelish said soothingly. “How about a dance with my lovely companion? Let’s start there.” He snapped his fingers and the music started up again: another waltz.

 

Lord Temperley grasped Sansa’s waist with sweaty hands. He was so drunk that he could hardly stumble through the steps; they kept bumping into other couples, who looked at Sansa with embarrassed sympathy. Lord Baelish, meanwhile, seemed to have vanished.

 

Sansa’s mind whirred. _You and Yin . . . thieves and scoundrels . . . I want my sixty thousand._

 

As the waltz came to an end, Sansa helped her partner to the edge of the ballroom, where there were tables with little sandwiches, bowls of punch, carafes of ice water and lemonade.

 

She poured a glass of lemonade. “Here, my lord. It will make you feel better.”

 

Lord Temperley took the glass, his bloodshot eyes considering her over the gilded rim. “You think I’m a fool,” he said. “A drunk fool.”

 

Sansa shook her head. “No, my lord,” she said. “You’re upset—and it seems you have right to be.”

 

“He said it would be easy money . . . he said that in six months my investment would be doubled.”

 

Sansa clucked her tongue sympathetically. “What happened, my lord?”

 

Lord Temperley looked at her with sudden suspicion.

 

She bit her lower lip, letting her fingers play with the strand of pearls at her breast. “I have no head for business, my lord, but even I know that something truly dreadful must have happened--to cause you to lose so much in a single stroke, I mean.”

 

For a moment Lord Temperley was silent, and she wondered if she had overplayed her hand.

 

He shrugged. “Someone tipped them off,” he said miserably. “The harbor guard. They took everything. He tricked me, somehow . . . they’re thick as thieves, he and Yin. They _are_ thieves.” Then he retched into an empty punch bowl.

 

Sansa looked away, feeling that she had seen quite enough vomit for one evening.

 

As couples cleared the floor, she found Lord Baelish, leaning against the opposite wall. He had been watching her. Sansa considered the relaxed posture, the veiled eyes, the thinly contemptuous mouth. Then a woman—the same bright-eyed old woman who had spoken to them outside—put a hand on his arm. He turned, momentarily distracted, and Sansa seized the opportunity to slip out of the ballroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! I'm so sorry about the pause in chapter updates. I got really sick, and that, in combination with some big deadlines at school, slowed down my writing. But I'm back now. I hope you enjoy this chapter--thanks for reading! xo


	9. All the Little Children

At first Sansa had no particular destination in mind. Her only thought was to get away from the humid ballroom and Lord Baelish’s watchful gaze. But as she walked, a plan began to form in her mind.

 

She turned down one corridor, then another, then another, taking the turns that seemed to lead away from the noise of the party. Eventually she found herself in the kitchen, where the stone counters and long oak table were piled up with empty wine glasses, half-eaten chickens and hams, plates smeared with frosting and crumbs. In the corner a brindled hound gnawed on a marrow-bone.

 

As Sansa bent to pet the dog, a young maid hurried in, clutching a bouquet of champagne flutes.

 

“Begging your pardon, miss,” the maid said as she set down the glasses. “But you’re not supposed to be here.”

 

Sansa straightened. “I’m looking for someone,” she said, as imperiously as she could. “A servant named Elyn. That girl spilled wine on my new velvet slippers. They are utterly ruined and I mean to have the cost taken out of her wages.”

 

The maid considered Sansa warily, then let her eyes drop to the floor. “I don’t know anyone by that name, my lady. Is she a maid?”

 

Sansa frowned. Elyn would make a wretched maid, but perhaps Lady Reena had taken her on as a paid companion? There were other possibilities, too—possibilities that Sansa, remembering Corporal Yin’s cold blue eyes, would rather not think about.

 

“Do not presume to ask me questions,” she said, so sharply that the maid flinched. “Tell me where I can find Elyn and perhaps I won’t complain to Lady Reena about _you_.”

 

Another maid appeared in the doorway, staggering under a pile of dirty table linens. She was older than the first, and much harder-looking. “What’s all this?” she barked. “No guests in the kitchen.” Her eyes found the hound, who was pressing his nose into Sansa’s hand. “Damn dog,” she said. “He’s supposed to bark at strangers, not make love to them.”

 

Sansa crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m looking for someone—a pretty girl, about my age. Blonde hair, blue eyes . . . a few broken teeth.”

 

The woman dumped the linens on the floor. Very slowly, she shook her head. “Never seen anyone like that here.” But as she spoke her eyes flicked to a door cut into the eastern wall of the kitchen.

 

“What’s through that door?” Sansa demanded.

 

“Nothing, miss,” said the younger maid. “Truly. Just the cellar.”

 

Sansa raised her chin. “Well. The two of you have been supremely unhelpful. You can be sure I’ll be speaking to Lady Reena about this.” With that, she swept out of the room.

 

She retreated down the short hall that led from the kitchen to the scullery, ducking into a curtained alcove. The alcove was blessedly empty, though heavy with the scent of tallow and the thin, sharp odor of decaying flowers.

 

Sansa peered for a moment through the loose weave of the curtain, then picked up a rose, twirling the stem between her fingers. Her hiding place was obviously a shrine, though she didn’t recognize the god painted on the wall. Whoever he was, he was handsome and well-muscled—and clad only in a few strategically placed leaves. She smiled to herself a little, remembering her old governess complaining about _those Venosan barbarians and their half-naked gods_.

 

Sansa waited until both of the maids had passed by, then hurried back into the kitchen, where, after patting the hound, she tried the cellar door and found it locked. Peering into the crack between door and frame, she saw the thick brass bars of one—no, two—deadbolts. What could Corporal Yin be keeping in his cellar that required two deadbolts to protect it? Something more than potatoes and dried apples, surely.

 

There was a small noise in the hall: the maids, returning with more dirty dishes and linens, most like. Sansa would have more difficulty explaining her presence in the kitchen this time.

 

She placed her hands flat against the door, trying to draw the image of an open deadbolt into her mind. She imagined the solid _snick_ as the bolt slid from lock to strike. A flickering pain beat at her wrists and throat, sharp but not unbearable. A moment later, mildly dizzy and with a slight stink of charred metal on her palms, she had both locks open.

 

Feeling rather pleased with herself, Sansa slipped through the door, closing it behind her.

 

*

 

She was standing at the top of a stairwell. She smelled damp stone, and when she ran her hand over the wall, she found it cool, uneven, a bit gritty. As her eyes adjusted to the dark she made out a dim, blueish light at the bottom of the stairs: a kerosene lantern.

 

Very carefully—no use dirtying a fine dress; much less use in tripping and breaking one’s neck—Sansa made her way down the stairs, pausing to lift the lantern off its nail.

 

At first she could hear no sound but the faint plash of water _drip-drip-dripping_ ; and an unpleasant scurrying that she suspected might be rats. But then she began to notice a low, repetitive noise, rather like someone humming. As she drew nearer she made out individual words:

 

“ _All the little children_  
_Bleeding from their heads_  
_The gods took the good ones to heaven_  
_And left the bad in their beds._ ”

 

Sansa halted. She knew the song—it was a nursery rhyme about a family of ten children who had been murdered by their mad governess. When she was a child, her brothers had liked to tease her by singing it at bedtime.

 

Listening to it now, something seemed to twist and turn cold inside her. “Who’s there?” she called out.

 

The voice fell silent; there was scuffling, and a little giggle. 

 

She tried again. “I won’t hurt you,” she said. “I’m a friend.” She took several steps forward, holding the lantern high.

 

There was someone hunched over on the floor, clutching what looked like a dead rat. “ _All the little children_ ,” they muttered. “ _Bleeding from their heads_.”

 

Sansa squatted down, heedless now of her fine dress, and said, “Don’t be afraid. I’m—”

 

The ragged figure looked up, blinking in the sudden light. It was Elyn Lanwood.

 

*

 

It _was_ Elyn—but something else was looking out from her blue eyes, something feral and half-mad. The girl lunged at her, spit spraying from her broken mouth.

 

Sansa skittered backwards, dropping the lantern. The glass shattered, filling the passage with darkness and the smell of kerosene.

 

Her heart hammering, Sansa said, soothingly, “It’s all right, Elyn. It’s Sansa. We were on the ship together, remember?” It would be better, perhaps, not to speak of their time as cellmates.

 

This statement was met by a sharp intake of breath. Then the horrid little song started up again:

 

“ _All the little children_  
_Bleeding from their heads_  
_The gods took the good ones to heaven_  
_And left the bad in their beds._ ”

 

“Come with me, Elyn,” Sansa said, extending her hands. “I can help you. Let’s leave this place, together. Please?”

 

“You’ll bleed too,” said Elyn. Her voice was thready, hoarse, childlike, with the slight lisp that Sansa remembered. “You’ll bleed and bleed and bleed, and he’ll never stop, he’ll never die . . .”

 

“No one is bleeding,” Sansa said firmly. “And no one is dying. Come, now. Come with me to a nice, warm place.”

 

There was a considering silence. “Are there cakes there?”

 

“Lots of cakes,” Sansa said.

 

“Will anyone make me bleed?” she asked, in a low, malicious tone that sent a shiver down Sansa’s spine.

 

“No,” Sansa said. “I promise, I won’t let them. You can trust me, Elyn.”

 

More silence, more shuffling. A moment later there was a small, grimy hand in hers.

 

“Do you know the way out?” Sansa asked.

 

“No, no, no,” Elyn whispered.

 

Sansa let out a long, shaken breath. Most cellars had two points of ingress: a interior door leading to the kitchen or storeroom on the main floor, and an exterior door used for unloading deliveries—of flour, vegetables, sugar, coffee. Of course, any exterior door would be locked, but she could open it. It must be close to nine by now. They would go outside and hide in the trees until Lord Baelish’s carriage returned.

 

“All right,” Sansa said, squeezing Elyn’s hand. “We’re going to walk this way. Let’s go very slowly, so that we don’t trip.”

 

“Very slowly, so that we don’t trip,” Elyn agreed.

 

They made their way down one passage and around a corner. Sansa trailed the fingers of her right hand along the wall; the fingers of her left she kept wrapped around Elyn’s wrist.

 

Soon her fingers brushed against a nail, from which another kerosene lantern hung, this one turned down very low. Sansa spun the small wheel on the side of the lantern, watching as the flame blazed from blue to white to gold.

 

“Did you hear that?” Elyn asked fearfully. “You woke them, with your noise and your light . . . we must always be very quiet, yes, very quiet.”

 

“Who did I wake, Elyn?”

 

The girl pointed into the darkness ahead of them.

 

“They won’t hurt us,” Sansa said.

 

But as they rounded another corner something heavy hit them from the left. Sansa cried out as whatever it was bit down on the soft flesh of her upper arm.

 

Elyn hissed and jerked free; Sansa lost her hold on the girl’s wrist but managed to keep the lantern.

 

“Elyn!” she shouted, trying to shake off the thing still clamped to her arm.

 

There was no answer from Elyn. Sansa held up the lantern, her heart thudding painfully. The thing looked up at her with black, baleful eyes, and then—slowly, terribly—it smiled.

 

Sansa screamed, swinging out wildly with the lantern. The creature fell back, squealing, as the rags covering its wasted body caught fire.

 

Sansa turned and began to run back the way they had come, trusting her feet to remember the twists and turns. She could hear the thing scrabbling behind her in the darkness.

 

At the bottom of the stairs stood one of Corporal Yin’s guards, holding a lantern in one hand and a naked sword in the other.

 

“Thank the gods,” she breathed, clutching at his arm. “I was supposed to meet Lord Hasterly down here . . . silly, I know. I rather think he was playing a prank on me and I frightened myself in the dark. Would you be so kind as to return me to the ballroom before my husband misses me?”

 

The guard raised his lantern, as if to get a better look at her. “I’ve never heard of any Lord Hasterly,” he said. “And I don’t think you’ve got a husband.”

 

Sansa released his arm and took a step back. It was the guard with the wheel tattoo beneath his ear, the guard who had tormented her and Elyn during their first days in Venosa.

 

“Careful,” he said, “You’d best take your chances with me: _They_ won’t be so kind. There’s more than a few of _Them_ down here, these days. And _They_ get real hungry.”

 

He sheathed his weapon, and, grabbing her wrist, yanked her close. “You’re a lot cleaner than you were,” he said, sniffing her neck. “You smell better, too.”

 

She kicked him in the shin.

 

Without a word, he brought the back of his gloved hand hard across her face.

 

“My protector won’t be happy when he finds me missing,” she said, her chest heaving. “You’d better take me upstairs. Lord Baelish is waiting.”

 

“Your protector,” the guard said softly, “is no match for mine. Corporal Yin has given strict instructions that anyone who comes into this cellar is not to come back out again.”

 

Her cheek and lip throbbing, and the bite on her arm burning, she smiled up at him. “You’re a good man,” she said, “to help me back to the party when I’ve been so silly as to get lost. I’m a silly woman, a very silly girl, nothing more.”

 

The words hung in the darkness like notes struck from a bell; Sansa could almost see them, round and silvery.

 

After a heart-shatteringly long moment of silence, the tattooed guard smiled, released her, straightened. “It’s my pleasure, miss. It’s just this way,” he said, pointing up the narrow staircase. “Here,” he added, “take my cloak; your dress is a bit dirty. You wouldn’t want to go back to the party like that.”

 

Sansa kept smiling, and, taking the cloak, pushed past him. “No,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t want that at all.”


	10. Persuasions

Sansa hurried through the empty kitchen, fastening the guard’s cloak with shaking fingers. She had no idea how long her spell would hold. She had no idea, in fact, how she had cast it at all: Lord Baelish had given her an academic understanding of persuasion, not a practical one.

 

It had been a wild hope, a shot in the dark. But it had worked.

 

She dabbed at her bloody lip with one of Lady Reena’s fine linen napkins and tried to smooth her mussed hair. She needed to find Lord Baelish as quickly as possible, and without drawing attention to herself.

 

But he was nowhere to be found; in fact, all of the party guests seemed to have vanished. The gallery with the pastry village was empty, as were both of the next two rooms. The sole occupant of the third room was an elderly woman fast asleep on a chaise, each snore puffing the delicate pink feathers of her headdress.

 

The strange, dream-like sense came upon Sansa again, the feeling that she had stumbled into a different world, muddled and unreal, where monsters dwelled in dark corners and words could bend a man’s will—and where, it seemed, hundreds of people could vanish without a trace.

 

He wouldn’t leave you, she told herself. But another voice answered, _he would if it suited him_.

 

She paused for a moment in the central hall where they had first entered, trying to decide whether it would be better to look for Lord Baelish in the yard, where he might be waiting for the carriage, or in the ballroom, where she had last seen him. Truth be told she was not sure that she wanted to find him at all. He was sure to be furious with her for wandering off and more furious still when he learned where she had gone.

 

She remembered the quiet way he had said, _Remember your part and play it well. Or I promise you, you will be very sorry before this night is through_ , and shivered. Having begun to shiver, Sansa found that she could not stop. Even with the guard’s cloak round her shoulders, her teeth chattered, her hands shook. Yard or ballroom? It seemed an impossible choice.

 

A long roar rising up from the direction of the ballroom settled the question. Sansa hastened towards the noise, slipping a little as she went on bits of party trash, glass and beads and glitter that crunched unpleasantly beneath her slippers.

 

The ballroom was seething with people; the entire party seemed to have poured into this one room. Large as the room was, it was not large enough: bodies pressed in on Sansa from every side. She pushed her way forward, stumbling as someone stepped on the hem of her gown.

 

Now that the exhilaration of escaping the cellar was fading, fear and pain had begun to set in. The crowd was frightening, monstrous; all sharp limbs and loud voices. Her cheek and lip throbbed, and the bite on her arm had begun to burn. The bite . . .

 

Don’t think about that now, she told herself. Find him. Find him. Find him.

 

But the room was full to overflowing, the crowd surging towards the doors on the south end.

 

A tall woman staggered into Sansa, grabbing hold of her injured arm for balance. Sansa cried out in pain, and would have fallen herself, but someone grasped her shoulders, righting her. She swung round to face a black leather mask and a pair of green eyes.

 

“It’s you,” she said, with relief.

 

“Belinda,” he said. His mouth was set in a pale, furious line, and the arm around her waist was tighter than was entirely comfortable.

 

He moved them against the crowd. He seemed to have a knack for it, tracing eddies and swirls of bodies, cutting through the human tide like a dancer, deft and graceful. Sansa, on the other hand, felt as if her feet had been cast in lead, each step requiring a greater effort than the last.

 

Once in the corridor, where it was slightly clearer, she gasped out, “What’s happened?”

 

“There’s been a death,” said Lord Baelish, “People are panicking.”

 

“A death?”

 

He didn’t answer, but rather led her into a small room off the main hall.

 

Sansa looked around, taking in the red and gold wallpaper, the delicate furniture, the lace curtains. “This is Lady Reena’s fainting room,” she said.

 

“Yes, well”—he had pushed aside the curtains and was looking intently out the window—“try to refrain from swooning if at all possible.”

 

“I don’t think we’re supposed to—”

 

Lord Baelish interrupted her with an extremely vulgar word. “You weren’t supposed to do a great many things that you did tonight,” he added. Then he smashed the window-latch, threw open the sash, and leapt through.

 

“Come along,” he called from below. “No time to waste.”

 

She peered down nervously; the drop was five or six feet, and she was still dizzy from the hot press of the ballroom.

 

“Jump,” he barked, holding out his arms.

 

After a moment’s hesitation, she obeyed. He deposited her on the pavement, where she wavered for a moment, unsteady on her feet.

 

Lord Baelish seemed not to notice. “This way,” he said.

 

“Who died?” she asked as he pulled her along—holding, thankfully, her uninjured arm.

 

“Alec Temperley.”

 

They rounded the corner; they were moving down another alley now, this one darker than the first.

 

“What?” Her voice echoed off the brick walls rising on either side of them.

 

“Louder, if you please,” said Lord Baelish. “I don’t think the entire city heard you.”

 

“How?” Sansa lifted her skirts to avoid a puddle. “How did he die?”

 

“Defenestration,” he said, over his shoulder.

 

“Defene—”

 

“Someone pushed him out a window,” he clarified. “A third floor window. He fell through the ballroom roof. Didn’t you see the glass? It was exceedingly awkward. Bits of Temperley splattered all over. Lord Morse was none too pleased. His new jacket is ruined—blood doesn’t come out of silk, you know.”

 

“Did you—” She began, thinking of Sir Gerrin, who had died in an alleyway very like the one they were hurrying down.

 

“Did _I_ kill him?” He gave her a sardonic look. “If I wanted to kill Alec Temperley, I’d hardly push him out a window,” he said. “Rather ostentatious, don’t you think? And anyway, I’m just a useless reprobate; I haven’t the least idea how to murder anyone. Ah, look, here’s the carriage. Right on time.”

 

“And where did you get that cloak, if I may ask?” he asked as he helped her into the vehicle. “Slaughtered one of the Yin’s household guard, did we?”

 

Sansa burst into tears.

 

Lord Baelish, settling into the seat opposite her, looked astonished. After a moment he took a handkerchief out of his pocket—black silk, of course—and handed it to her.

 

“Well, Belinda, if you really did kill one it’s nothing to cry about,” he said. “Everyone knows that Yin employs the worst sort of cutthroats. And what did I tell you about pity?”

 

_Pity makes us soft when we should be hard, makes us falter when we should strike._

 

He took off his mask, tossing it onto the bench beside him, then leaned across to tilt her chin up.

 

She read in his face the moment when the moonlight slanting through the carriage window found the bruised cheek, the split lip.

 

“What happened?” he asked, very quietly.

 

“We have to go back,” she managed, gulping back tears. “We have to go back for Elyn.”

 

“Who?” His brow creased.

 

“Elyn Lanwood. She’s a merchant’s daughter, from the capital. We were on the ship together. Yin has her locked up in the cellar. . . and there’s something else down there, something awful.” She swallowed a sob, remembering what the guard had said. _They get real hungry_.

 

Lord Baelish had settled back into his own seat now, his gaze distant.

 

She straightened, wiping at her face with his handkerchief. “You’re not surprised at all,” she said. “You already knew. You’re in on it with him—whatever it is—Lord Temperley said that you and Yin were ‘thick as thieves’—”

 

“Did he now?” Lord Baelish said, but calmly, as if Lord Temperley had said that he was rubbish at tennis, or a cheat at cards.

 

“Yes, and that’s probably why you killed him!” She accused. “Just like you killed Sir Gerrin. But Elyn is—she’s just a girl like me—” Sansa was so angry that she could hardly get the words out.

 

“No,” he interrupted, his voice cold and hard. “Whoever this Elyn is, she is not like you. _You_ are special. _You_ have abilities that make you important to—”

 

Fury blazed up in her, a fierce, wild flame. “Important to what?” She spat out the words. “To your plan, whatever it is—you still haven’t told me a word of it, you just expect me to follow along blindly—”

 

“I did pay for you,” he said, still infuriatingly calm. “It was all very—well, _mostly_ —aboveboard. I can show you the bill of sale if you like.”

 

“And what happens to me once we’ve carried out your nefarious plot? Will you let Yin dispose of me? Or will you order one of your thugs to slit my throat?”

 

He leaned forward again. For perhaps three heartbeats he was silent, caressing her cheek. Then, very lightly, he pressed his thumb to the center of her bruise.

 

She shuddered as blood throbbed, hot beneath the tender skin.

 

“Sansa,” he said, in a voice hardly above a whisper. “Dear, sweet Sansa. If I want you dead, I promise, I will kill you myself.”

 

*

 

Back at Mockingbird House, Lord Baelish made a point of escorting Sansa to her chamber. “Do I need to lock you in?” he asked.

 

Sansa, sinking onto the bed, ignored this. She was too tired to argue any more.

 

He left, returning a few moments later with a cup of warm wine and a chunk of salted ice wrapped in cloth.

 

“Drink this,” he said, “and hold this to your cheek. You’re going to look like you were on the losing end of a barroom brawl tomorrow.”

 

Silently she accepted both the cup and the ice.

 

He settled onto the window seat, crossing his legs in front of him. “What really did happen? With Yin’s guard?” he asked.

 

Sansa looked past him, holding the ice to her cheek. “He caught me in the cellar,” she said. “And I . . . persuaded him to let me go.” she said. “I’ve no idea how I did it. I was so frightened.”

 

“Fear can be powerfully motivating,” he said.

 

“It was as if I wanted him to let me go so much that my wanting became a physical thing; as real as this cloak or that candle there. I could almost see my words, floating in the air.” She looked up. “It was exciting. Bending his will to mine.”

 

“Yes,” he said evenly.

 

“It’s wrong,” she said.

 

He shrugged. “Some have a talent for the pianoforte, some for persuasion. Why is it wrong to use the gifts the gods have given to you?”

 

She raised her eyes to his, and let the hand holding the ice rest in her lap. “It is wrong to decide that some people are . . . important and some are there to be bent to your will. Which is why—I find that I need to”—she was stumbling, struggling to find the right words—“I believe that I tried to persuade you other night when you were here, in my chamber, visiting me. When I asked you about the ring.” She remembered the sudden change in his manner, the way that his hands had stilled in her hair.

 

“Yes, you did try. A very clumsy attempt.”

 

“I didn’t mean to.”

 

“I know.”

 

“It was wrong. And I am sorry for it,” she said stiffly.

 

He gave her a small smile. “I’m not surprised you have a gift for persuasion.” He seemed on the verge of saying more, then checked.

 

She found that she was too tired to press him. It was a soul-deep tiredness; aching and damp. She was cold again, too, despite the cloak and the fire.

 

“You’re exhausted,” he said, standing. “Let me call a maid to help you out of that dress.”

 

“Wait,” she said. “Tell me about the ring. You can’t have everything a secret, always, Petyr.”

 

At her use of his name something in his face shifted. “Ah,” he said. “So you mean to use a different kind of persuasion.”

 

He turned to face the window. The dark glass reproduced his face in wavy, spectral lines, and Sansa, staring into the black holes of his mirror-eyes, was seized by the sudden fancy that the real Lord Petyr Baelish had died long ago, and the current master of Mockingbird House was but a ghost, a wraith, an echo.

 

Without turning, he said, “The ring belonged to the woman I loved.”

 

“Oh.” This was not, somehow, been what she had been expecting. She leaned back against the headboard, then risked her next question, “Where is she now?”

 

This time he answered at once. “Dead.”

 

“I am sorry,” she said.

 

He let out a short, mirthless laugh, and finally turned, saying, “What do you have to be sorry for?”

 

She looked at him, then said, quietly, “Your pain.” She smiled at him, then, but he did not smile back. His face had the far away, veiled look that she was learning to recognize.

 

He cleared his throat. “We’ll talk more tomorrow,” he said. “You can ask me your questions then. But you should sleep now. I believe I’ve been here long enough to satisfy even my most lewdly imaginative servants. If you don’t want me to send the maid in, will you let me unlace your gown?”

 

She shrugged.

 

“You’re shivering,” he said. “I’ll build up the fire before I go.”

 

As she lay there, limp, drifting, he began to remove the guard’s cloak. The room seemed full of the smell of him, cold night air and mint and far away places. But there was something else, too, something that smelled of the butcher, of putrifying flesh, of blood on steel. Lord Baelish smelled it, too; he raised his head, sniffing at the air like a hound.

 

Then he picked up her left arm. The pain was very bad but somehow she didn’t have it in her to cry out.

 

“Oh gods,” she heard him say, but from very far away. He was saying her name now, again and again and again.

 

Her gaze drifted down to her arm, now bare. The flesh was blackened, darkness spreading out from the bite, radiating down towards the wrist and up towards the shoulder in a pattern like cracks in ice or rivers on a map.

 

She was in his arms. They were climbing; ascending in rapid, jerking, steps. We must be going to his study, she thought vaguely. It seemed to take a long time and no time at all. She was on fire and she was freezing. She was floating and she was sinking. She was waking and she was sleeping . . .

 

She was lying on the big oak table. He was standing over her with a great curved knife.

 

Everything seemed to blur; now he was holding the knife to her throat, now bending her back over the table, kissing her, whispering, _I hate you, too_.

 

“Please don’t,” she tried to say, as the blade glinted blood-red in the candlelight. Then she knew nothing at all.


	11. The Blood of Áth Dara

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, lovely readers! HAPPY FRIDAY. :)

Sansa found herself upon a steep hillside. Above her a sky the color of spring hyacinths blazed; below her a valley spread lush and quick with life, wound through with wildflowers and a herd of red-hooved deerlings.

 

The sun was warm on her back. The air hummed with the sleepy tick of insects, the stirring of small animals in the underbrush, the _shh-shh-shh_ of wind through leaves.

 

Far below, at the western end of the valley, stood a stone manor house, tall and wide and surrounded by stands of ancient, towering oaks. The house looked as though it had stood for a thousand years and would stand for a thousand more. It looked as though its walls had grown up out of the earth, natural as a forest, fitting as those little deer.

 

A gentle westerly wind picked up her hair. The wind smelled of warm grass and clean water and wild green things, and it seemed to bring the name of the house to her: _Áth Dara_.

 

With the name came the memory of Ros’s words: _A wild, lonely place. The empire never bothered to conquer it. Some think that’s not accident. The people from that part of the country are . . . strange_.

 

Sansa had been standing on the hillside for she knew not how long, letting the sun sink into her skin and watching the deer pick their way through the grass, when a blurry-dark smudge appeared on the horizon. At first she thought the smudge a flock of birds—starlings, perhaps, or crows; they sometimes moved in cloud-like murders. But it was too dark, too fast-moving.

 

She shaded her eyes. A storm; the clouds black and violet and indigo and laced through with silvery, snapping lightning.

 

The storm came rolling over the land like a great spiraling shadow, and Sansa knew that if it reached the valley something terrible would happen.

 

As she watched, helpless, horror-stricken, the storm devoured the stone house, the oaks, the deer, the whole of the valley, growing closer and closer until at last she could see that there were things seething in the clouds: faces white as dinner plates; dark eyes; warm, sharp mouths. The wind that lashed her face no longer smelled of fresh growing things but of char and iron and rot.

 

All around her was darkness and flashing teeth. She began to hear things: her mother’s keening wail when they brought home her father’s body, the Venosan soldiers’ laughter as they pulled Arya from the carriage, Elyn crying that first night in the prison cell, the little gasps that Sir Gerrin made as blood bubbled from the cut crossing his throat.

 

And winding through it, that song, that dreadful song, sung in a high, wavering, child-like voice:

 

 _“All the little children_  
_Bleeding from their heads_  
_The gods took the good ones to heaven_  
_And left the bad in their beds.”_

 

When the storm swallowed her, it was almost a relief.

 

*

 

_A hand moves over her brow._

 

_“Mother,” she tries to say, but her lips won’t move. She needs to tell someone about the storm. “It is coming,” she gasps out. “It is coming for us.”_

 

_A voice in her ear, low and lulling. A hushed, humming tune, wordless and lovely and old, that calls up for her light on swaying grass, moss on old stone, the wind in the leaves._

 

_“Sleep,” the voice says, and so she does._

 

*

 

She was standing in an unfamiliar room. The room was round, its walls made of black stone, each block as tall as Sansa and twice as wide again. A fire blazed in the enormous hearth, which was carved on every side with patterns of gylphs, crosses and spirals and leaves and stars and waves and eyes.

 

A vaulted roof rose overhead, and the windows looked out onto a dark, rain-lashed sea.

 

Sitting in a chair near the hearth was a woman, bird-like and frail, her pale skin stretched tight over her bones, her white hair cropped close to her head. She stared into the fire, and the flames reflected strangely in her dark eyes, as if there were more flames in her eyes than in the fire itself.

 

The woman did not seem to see or hear Sansa. Yet at a knock at the door she called out, “Come in,” in a clear, bell-like voice.

 

A dark-haired young man entered. He bowed to the woman—a trifle sullenly, it seemed to Sansa—and said, “You summoned me, Magistrix?”

 

“Petyr,” the woman began, and Sansa’s heart lurched. She considered the dark curls, the grey-green eyes, the arrogant tilt of the nose. The boy was Lord Baelish, to be sure, but he was very young—no more than fourteen or fifteen years old.

 

“I would have you look at me when I am speaking to you.” The woman spoke sternly, yet there was fondness in her voice. “I hear that you have been dueling with Yrel Asfirn. And using forbidden spell-words—is this true?”

 

For several moments the boy was silent. He looked up, then hard away. “You’re going to expel me,” he said, with great bitterness. “It isn’t _right_. It isn’t _fair_.”

 

The birdlike woman shook her head. “Do not speak to me about ‘right’ and ‘fair.’ Dueling is a serious offence. Never mind the forbidden spell-words. . .” She paused. “Well? Nothing to say for yourself?”

 

“Nothing you’ll want to hear, Magistrix,” the boy said, his hands balled at his sides.

 

The woman clicked her tongue. “So much passion,” she said. “Too much. If you wish to become a great sorcerer you must learn to control it. Else it will control you.” She glanced at the window. “You are as wild as that sea out there, do you know that?”

 

The boy’s chest heaved. He seemed to be struggling not to speak.

 

The woman sighed. “We cannot expel Yrel,” she said. “For his father funds our new defenses. Therefore I will not allow the Council to expel you. But”—she held up one shaking hand—“I cannot protect you forever.”

 

“Yes, Magistrix,” the boy said, sounding relieved and very slightly chastened.

 

“Good,” the woman said. “Now come here.”

 

The boy knelt by her chair and the woman placed a hand on his curls. “May the gods dark and light bless you,” she said.

 

The boy started to rise, but the woman’s hand tightened.

 

The boy looked up, and Sansa saw then how young he truly was, and how the dark, hard thing that would later enter his eyes was not yet in them.

 

“There is a storm coming,” the woman said, and her voice was strange, still clear but darker, somehow; grown minor in tone. “It seems sometimes to rise from the North, sometimes from the East. But rise it does.”

 

“Why are you telling me, Magistrix? Oughtn’t you tell the Council?” The boy spoke a little slyly, but the woman did not notice, or pretended not to.

 

In one shaking, claw-like hand she gripped his chin. “I tell you because I have also seen you. It seems that you have some part to play in what is to come.”

 

The boy’s face had gone pale, all the arrogance and impatience drained out of it. “Tell me,” he demanded.

 

The woman shook her head. “It is no bad thing to feel, Petyr, but you feel too much, too deeply. You’re like your mother in that way.” She smiled. “You have greatness in you. That is why the Council watches you so closely—it frightens them, the responsibility of shaping such a power.”

 

“And it annoys them because my family is not wealthy like Yrel’s,” the boy said hotly. “They think Yrel should be First. Just last week Magister Lux said—”

 

The woman chuckled, ruffling his hair. “Smooth your feathers, my young hawk. Your father may not be rich, but his blood is old enough to please even Magister Lux.” Her face grew more somber. “You must make the blood of Áth Dara your ballast, Petyr. You must be very careful to guard your heart against corruption, against your own passion. Say ‘yes, Magistrix, I promise.’”

 

“Yes, Magistrix, I promise,” said the boy.

 

The woman produced a small gold blade from somewhere on her person, and quick as lightning, flicked it across the base of the boy’s throat. She dipped her finger into the wound, then crossed the boy’s brow with his own blood, drawing a circle with a dot in the center of it. “By the Eye, I seal your vow in blood, Petyr Baelish of Áth Dara. If ever you break it, may death and destruction come upon you and your house. May it be.”

 

The boy, a little shaken, repeated, “May it be.”

 

“Off with you, now,” the woman said, shooing him. “It’s time for my afternoon nap.”

 

The boy glanced once over his shoulder before closing the door behind him. The Magistrix look down at her fingers, still wet with the boy’s blood. Then, very quietly, she began to weep.

 

*

 

_She remembers the story in bits and pieces; images come to her one by one, in quick, flashing fragments that she must string together._

 

_Once upon a time a girl was tricked by an evil witch who stole her eyes. The witch locked the girl’s eyes in a golden box, then hid the box in the deepest part of the forest. The girl sets off, wandering blind and spellbound through all the perils the wood in search of the box._

 

_But no matter how hard she tries, Sansa cannot remember the end of the story. All she sees is the girl, lost amid the dark trees—an image multiplied as if in a great mirror, iterative and endless._

 

You’re dreaming. Stories cannot end in dreams.

 

Wake up.

 

Sansa, wake up.

 

_A face floats above her: pale, shadowed. It reminds her of something, something bad, and she begins to thrash and scream._

 

_But her hands are bound, or weighted in some way, and she cannot free herself. Everything hurts, and the world is bright and terrible, and her screams are silent._

 

_The witch, she realizes, has stolen her voice._

 

_From somewhere far above, or perhaps far below, a great lidless eye watches._

 

*

 

Sansa sat amidst tall grass. The air was cool, and full of the salt-dark smell of the sea, which spread languidly before her, grey troughs rolling to blue horizon.

 

Behind her rose black stone walls; ancient, massive, seemingly impenetrable. She knew, somehow, that if she were to get up and walk fifty paces to the east she would see the dark spire of the Magistrix’s tower vanishing into the clouds.

 

After a few moments someone settled onto the sand beside her. She knew that it was him before she looked; knew his smell, that mixture of magic and wild green things that she now recognized as _Áth Dara_.

 

She studied her hands, spread before her, limned by milky sunlight. She closed and opened her fingers, hiding and revealing the sun. It seemed important, somehow, this game of little eclipses, but, in the way of dreams, the knowledge hovered just out of reach. “Am I dead?” she asked him.

 

“Not yet,” he answered. “But if you don’t wake up soon I’ll have to kill you.” He said this without apology or malice: it was a fact, and that was all.

 

Sansa looked at him. This was the Lord Baelish that she knew; the man the boy had become. She saw how the landscape was reflected in his features: the grey-green of the sea in his eyes, the dark of the waves in his hair. He belonged here in a way that he did not belong in Venosa.

 

What had he called this place? Iona. _Later I was sent to the sorcerer’s academy on Iona._

 

Her eyes found the small scar at the base of his throat. “I’m turning into one of Them,” she said. “The thing that bit me.”

 

He squinted into the horizon. His face was pale, shadowed.

 

He always looked tired, she thought, but just now he looked very tired indeed.

 

“I’m holding it off for now. But I can’t do it forever. You must fight, Sansa.”

 

She realized, then, that when he said _Sansa_ he meant something else entirely—what, she didn’t know. He had kept her confused with  _Alayne_ s and _Belinda_ s, and now _Sansa_ was a cipher, her own name made strange to her by his tongue.

 

“Whatever’s happening,” she said. “It’s bigger than Corporal Yin and smuggled guns and stolen girls.” She plucked a blade of grass and began to wind it around her wrist. “It’s bigger than the war, even.”

 

“Yes,” he agreed. “Much bigger.”

 

“I don’t understand it.”

 

“Nor I,” he said. “Not really. Not yet.”

 

She drew in the sandy earth with her forefinger, aimlessly at first and then with intention. She drew the eye that the Magistrix had drawn on the young Petyr’s forehead, a circle with a dot in the center.

 

He looked at what she had drawn, and then at her, and she thought: this is the first time I have ever seen him, really. Had he changed or had she? The dark, hard thing in his eyes was still there; but  that, too, she saw as if for the first time. It was a weapon, yes—but it was a blade with no hilt, a sharpness that bit into him even as he wielded it.

 

For several heartbeats he seemed to study her face. Then he leaned forward, placing one hand on her cheek and one on her breastbone. His palms were warm, and the warmth seemed to seep into her, down her throat and into her chest, until she was not sure if the thing beating there belonged to her or to him.

 

His hands slid beneath her, and he lowered her onto the sand. He loomed above her, his arms braced on either side of her ribcage. Behind him the late sun was blinding, a halo, and when they breathed, their chests met, kissing and separating, kissing and separating. A different kind of eclipse; a subtler game of dark and light.

 

She looked up at him. “Is this your dream?” she asked, “Or mine?”

 

Something in his jaw moved and she saw, suddenly, the boy in him.

 

His hand slid up her skirt, running over the outside of her calf, her thigh.

 

She closed her eyes, the sun flaring against the backs of her eyelids.

 

His hand moved higher.

 

She made a small sound in the back of her throat.

 

“Wake up,” he whispered.


	12. Awakenings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi readers! A lovely commenter asked for a re-cap of "the war" referred to by the characters. While I don't want to give too much away (I like a nice slow trickle of information . . .), here's a brief overview:
> 
> Sansa was born in the capital city of an empire known (thus far, at least) only as "the Empire"--in this world, there aren't any other empires with which to confuse it. Her father is (was) a government administrator. 
> 
> Four years prior to the start of the story, several of the Empire's oldest colonies--including the city-state of Venosa--rebelled. The Empire was utterly unprepared, and stretched too thin over its many dominions and territories; eventually, the capital was sacked by rebel forces.
> 
> When the city fell, many young women from the noble and merchant classes (like Sansa and Elyn) were taken prisoner and brought to Venosa and other former colonies as "rewards" for high-level government and military officials.
> 
> Petyr's role in all of this is not clear, but we do know that 1) Sansa was given to him by the Venosan Queen (whom we have not yet met) as a reward for services rendered during the war and 2) he seems to have asked for Sansa specifically.
> 
> Thank you ever so much for reading. <3

When Sansa opened her eyes Ros was looming over her like an anxious moon, her face pale and pinched-looking.

 

As blurred colors resolved themselves into the outlines of her bedroom at Mockingbird House—window-seat, table, chair, painting—she struggled to sit. But her limbs seemed to have been disconnected from her mind: when she tried to move her left arm, it lay there, boneless, limp as empty flesh.

 

“You’re still weak,” Ros said, as she helped Sansa to lean against the pillows. “Don’t try to move or speak just yet.” She handed her a glass filled with a brownish, murky liquid. “Be a good girl and drink this.”

 

Sansa took a sip and blanched. It tasted of bitter herb and black earth.

 

“Wormroot,” Ros said. “It will strengthen you. Drink it and wait a little; you’ll see.”

 

Sansa drained the glass and handed it back to Ros, then managed to croak out her question. “How long?”

 

Ros did not answer at once, busying herself first with drawing the curtains against the afternoon sun and then with settling herself on the brocade chair in the corner. Sitting there, with her head tilted and one of her romance novels on the table beside her, the housekeeper looked very much as she had on Sansa’s first morning at Mockingbird House. She smiled—a bit tightly—and said, “six days.”

 

Six days. It seemed an unimaginable amount of time to lose. Sansa shut her eyes, remembering the hot press of the ballroom, the mad dash from the mansion, the argument in the carriage. She remembered other things, too; but she would not think of them now.

 

She opened her eyes. “Where is he?”

 

“Down the bay,” said Ros. “The _Clíodhna_ is being careened tonight.”

 

Sansa rubbed her face. The sunlight, even filtered through the curtains, hurt her eyes. Her mouth was dry and sticky, and tasted unpleasantly of wormroot. “The _Clíodhna_?”

 

“His ship. A lovely little schooner. Empire-built, of course, and quicker than light. He had it sent from the capital—oh, three years ago now.”

 

Three years ago: just around the time of the May Day Rebellion, the first official action of the war.

 

Sansa wondered where he had taken his lovely little _Clíodhna_ since then.

 

She remembered the night she had met him, when he had stormed into her cell with a face like thunder, smelling of night air, his black cloak billowing around him. She remembered Sir Gerrin saying, _General Yin’s son asked for her, my lord, but the Queen said that because of your service in the war you must have your just reward._

 

She thought of looking through his telescope at Reena Yin’s wedding gift, the pretty little boat sagging under the weight of hundreds of smuggled guns, and of Lord Temperley hissing, _You and Yin . . . thieves and scoundrels, that’s what you are._

 

Why do I stay with him, knowing all of this? The question, as she put it to herself, was sharp, unforgiving, harsh as noon. It was true that she had not come to Mockingbird House willingly. It was also true that no chains had been placed round her ankles or wrists.

 

Perhaps he knew they were not necessary.

 

She stayed because he offered her something that no one else could. She remembered her first lesson: how she had said, _I don’t want to be afraid_ , and he had answered, _there is no such thing as safety_. It seemed to her the first true thing that anyone had said to her, ever.

 

She remembered the heat of his hands, and the feeling of his power calling out to her and her own rising up in answer. Two streams, one cool and green, one warm and black, twining together, braiding in an alternating pattern of light and dark, dark and light.

 

_Do you trust him?_ a voice asked, and it seemed to Sansa to be the voice of the bird-like lady from her dream, the one that young Petyr had called Magistrix.

 

Did she trust him? She didn’t know. Was that not itself a kind of answer?

 

_There is no such thing as safety_ , he had said, and in her mind his voice tangled with her mother’s promising her, _there is nothing to fear, darling._

 

“Isn’t it dangerous to . . . careen ships at night?” Sansa asked. She knew a little bit about ships; her brothers had been ship-obsessed, begging their father to take them to the harbor, building little models of brigantines and galleons and caravels. Robb especially had cherished dreams of joining the Imperial Navy, though as the eldest son he never would have been allowed to enlist. Jon or Bran or Rickon might have done, if . . .

 

Better not to think about them now, or perhaps ever. Sansa pushed her brothers behind the same door that suppressed what she had seen in Corporal Yin’s cellar, and the things she had dreamed while sleeping these six days past.

 

_Not sleeping_ , said the voice of the Magistrix. _My dear, you are finally waking up. Do not be afraid._

 

But Sansa was afraid. She began to pile things against her imaginary door: a dollhouse, a birdcage, a stuffed bear. Frail protection against what seethed beyond, but one must make use of what one has, and her old life had given her precious little that might help her now.

 

Ros seemed not to have noticed that her patient’s attention had drifted. “Yes,” she was saying. “It is dangerous. For both the men and the ship. But he wants the _Clíodhna_ ready, and he doesn’t want anyone to see him getting her ready.”

 

Sansa ran her palms over the coverlet. “Are you angry with me?” she asked. There was a strange pitch to Ros’s voice, a flicker of heat in her blue eyes.

 

The housekeeper smoothed her skirts. Her face was the very picture of feminine composure, the only sign of strain a tendon standing out on one side of her delicate neck. After a moment of silence, she asked, “Do you know how I came to work for Lord Baelish?”

 

Sansa shook her head.

 

Ros smiled, but it was a hard, glittering sort of smile, the kind that might dart out to slice at you. A razor-in-a-dark alley sort of smile. “He bought me,” she said. “From a brothel. A pleasure house. That’s what they’re called in Anwan. A stupid name, as most of what happens in such places has very little to do with pleasure.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Sansa said, awkwardly, not entirely certain what she was apologizing for. Perhaps for what she had said that day in the carriage: _I’d rather be an expensive whore than a cheap one._

 

I didn’t know, she wanted to say. I didn’t understand. But Ros already knew that: _you know nothing about me_ , she had told Sansa.

 

“I watched him come up the front walk,” Ros said, and her voice was calm and somehow remote, as if she were reciting a fairy story, as if all of this had happened a long time ago in a far away land. “A fine, handsome lord. How the girls preened for him! But he chose _me_ —scrawny, underfed thing that I was. None of them bothered to hide their surprise when he paid the _senhira_ for three hours with me. But once we were alone, his face changed. Like he’d been wearing a mask.”

 

Ros’s gaze had grown as distant as her voice. She toyed with the pearls at her throat, spinning them between pale fingers. “But underneath the fine, handsome lord was—another mask. Something colorless and hard. Looking at him, I fancied that there was another mask beneath that one, and another and another and another, until, beneath the last mask, there was nothing at all.”

 

Ros’s hands had stilled. “‘I know what you are,’ he told me. ‘They don’t, but they’ll figure it out soon enough, and when they do they’ll kill you, or sell you to someone who will do worse than kill you.’” Her eyes focused. “They burn witches in Anwan, you know. And . . . other things.”

 

Sansa found that she was gripping the coverlet in her fists.

 

“I went with him,” Ros said, with weary air of someone completing an unpleasant task. “Though he frightened me then and he frightens me now.” She paused. “He’s a frightening man, Alayne.”

 

“My name’s not Alayne,” said Sansa. It was all that she could manage.

 

“I know that.” Ros sounded almost pitying. “I’ve always known that.” She came to stand by the bed, placing a cool, soft hand on Sansa’s forehead. “I swear to all the gods,” she murmured, “if any harm comes to him of which _you_ are the cause . . .” Her native accent, winding as the streets of Venosa, seeped into her words.

 

Beneath the housekeeper’s hand, Sansa’s skin had begun to warm. She nodded to show that she understood.

 

“Now then,” Ros said, in a more ordinary voice, “How about something to eat? Some toast and jam? Or a nice warm posset, if your stomach is unsettled from the wormroot?” She patted the coverlet, but somehow this, too, felt like a threat. “I’ll be back soon. You rest now.”

 

*

 

The housekeeper returned with tray piled with food, all bland, soft things appropriate for a convalescent: herbal tea, groaty pudding, white toast and sweet-bramble jam, and a posset that smelled of lemons and wine.

 

Sansa drank the posset, though she would have preferred plain wine, or perhaps a tumblerful of the clear, sharp-scented liquor that Lord Baelish favored.

 

Ros set a stack of books on the night table. “He left these for you,” she said. “I’ve some things to do. Ring the bell if you need anything.” She paused in the doorway. “The servants have been told that you’ve had another fever. But if anyone should come in—make sure to keep your left arm covered.”

 

Sansa did not want to think about her arm. So she pushed it behind the door with the other bad things and looked through the books that Lord Baelish had left for her. The first was _The Threefold Fire_ , which she had already read. She was about to set it aside when a bit of parchment slipped out, bearing an imperative written in a heavy, slanting hand: _read it again_.

 

She crumpled up the note and threw it into the fireplace.

 

There was a book on potions ( _The Sceptical Chymist_ ), another on basic persuasion spells ( _The Breviary of Philosophie_ ), and a heavy tome that consisted mostly of elaborate diagrams about the transfer of energy ( _Musaeum Hermiticum_ ).

 

Sansa opened _The Sceptical Chymist_. The author was a Sir Thomar Vaughan, who identified himself as a Magus of the Rosicrucian Order—an honorific which meant nothing to Sansa but clearly meant a great deal to Sir Thomar.

 

She ran her fingers over the inscription scrawled on the flyleaf: _PETYR Ó ÁTH DARA_. It was his handwriting, without a doubt, but a far less practiced version. There was an ink-splotch by the _P_ and last two words were so messy as to be nearly illegible, the letters sprawling and then contracting as they ran towards the edge of the page. This, she thought, must be another of his schoolbooks. She turned the page.

 

_I, being, a sorcerer and a lover of learning, decreed to write this treatise of secrets in the year of the world's redemption 1645, in the six and sixtieth year of my age, that I might pay my duty to the Sons of Art._

 

Sansa sighed: no mention of the Daughters of the Art, of course.

 

_Now therefore I presage that not a few will be enlightened by these my labors._

 

Two sentences in and Sansa already wanted to toss _The Sceptical Chymist_ into the fireplace. Had the book’s author been present, she wouldn’t have minded tossing him in as well. The young Petyr had shared her disdain, as he had made clear in a series of snide marginal comments. A few made her laugh out loud.

 

_These are no fables, but real Experiments that I have made and know, as every other adept will conclude by these lines_ [THIS ADEPT HAS INSTEAD CONCLUDED THAT YOU ARE A BILIOUS GOUTY OLD WINDBAG WHO HAS NEVER CAST A SPELL IN HIS LIFE]. _In truth, many times I laid aside my pen_ [O WOULD THAT IT HAD ROLLED OFF YR DESK AND BEEN LOST FOREVER] _, but the Goddess compelled me to write_ [ARE YOU SURE IT WASN’T YR MAIDSERVANT CALLING YOU TO SUPPER? OR ROTTEN AIR SHIFTING IN YR BOWELS?] _and her I could in no wise resist, who alone knows the heart and unto whom be glory for ever. I believe that many in this last age of the world shall be rejoiced with the Great Secret_ [BAH!] _because I have written so faithfully, leaving of my own will nothing_ [EVERYTHING] _in doubt for a young beginner . . ._

 

Sir Thomar, after praising his own intelligence and talent for several pages, ended the first chapter with a warning:

 

_Now to the Queen, Eternal, Immortal, great Goddess, be everlasting praise for these Her unspeakable gifts. Whosoever enjoyeth this Talent, let him_ —

 

Or her, Sansa amended.

 

_Let him be sure to employ it to the glory of the Goddess and the good of his neighbours, lest he be found ungrateful to the Goddess—who has blessed him with so great a talent—and so be found guilty and so condemned, by the Goddess Herself, to the fate which is worse than Death._

 

Sansa shut the book.

 

_The fate which is worse than Death._ This was the first she had heard about _that_. What was the point of having this “talent,” anyway? It seemed more troublesome than not.

 

In Anwan they burned witches; at home they conquered them. Sansa had been taught that sorcery was barbaric insanity, a sickness that lingered in the dark places of the world where the light of the Empire had not yet reached.

 

And now the mighty Empire was a shambles: its dominions and territories in open rebellion, its capital city sacked. The dark places of the world would grow darker.

 

Sansa thought about how quickly the capital had fallen—how the rebel forces had closed around the city like a fist, and how, out of the three companies that remained to protect the city, two had fallen victim to a mysterious fever that ran through their ranks like fire, and the third had vanished into a strange mist that had risen on the floodplain east of the city. The next morning the northern gate had fallen, and her mother had put Sansa and her sister in a carriage and said, _there is nothing to fear, darling._

 

Love, Sansa thought, could tell the most terrible lies.

 

*

 

Sansa knew that he was there even before she opened her eyes. He had made some slight noise as he shut the door. He never made noise unless he meant to.

 

“How’s your beautiful ship?” she whispered into the darkness.

 

He drew nearer the bed, his face revealed by a thin trickle of moonlight. “On her ass, at the moment.”

 

“I thought you might leave,” she said.

 

He pulled his gloves through his hands.

 

“ _Clíodhna_ ,” she said, and then, “was that her name?”

 

After a few moments of silence he murmured, “Sansa,” and that was all.

 

“Don’t,” she said.

 

But he drew nearer still, and for an instant she saw him not as he was but as he had seemed in her dream: haloed by blinding sunlight, his face not less beautiful but more kind. But the fancy passed, leaving midnight darkness and midnight silence, cut through with slivers of cool grey moonlight.

 

“Sansa,” he said again, and she understood, suddenly, that the riddle of her name on his lips was yet another version of the game they were always playing: light and dark, dark and light.

 

“No,” she said, and what she meant was, I will not play.

 

But he murmured _Sansa_ once more, and three times was a fairy tale number, three princesses, three tasks, three wishes, and her name was no longer a warning but a window, a casement opening on a strange new world, and she need only say yes, yes I will, yes, take his hand, and step through.

 

She closed her eyes as he pressed his cool lips to her forehead.


End file.
